Mr President, we have now reached the home straight in a Commission initiative – I would call it a good Commission initiative – designed to achieve harmonisation of legislation on insurance mediation. This is a field which so far had not been harmonised. This gap will now be filled and fortunately, I believe, for the better, because the internal market in insurance is crippled if there are no common rules for the commercial networks. If the insurance companies can act within Union territory without any borders, it is clearly also necessary that those who offer their products should be able to act under common rules, with freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services, once and for all in the internal market. That, however, is not all that is needed: we must also harmonise our laws to achieve high standards of consumer protection in an area such as this, where there is a highly significant imbalance between the information held by the vendors of the products and that held by the purchasers. This is one of the objectives in this proposal for a directive. At first reading, Parliament adopted a total of 40 amendments, some admittedly by a tiny majority. In the common position, just over half were accepted either as they stood or at least in spirit. Now, at second reading, Parliament has repeated some of the amendments that were not adopted, although it has done so in terms which I think make their approval by the other institutions likely. While on this subject, I should like to reflect a little on the codecision procedure, and this makes me think that, if this procedure is generalised, it cannot and must not lead to proceedings becoming unnecessarily lengthy or, if the co-legislating institutions start from different positions, to each one sticking to its own position without coming to any reasonable agreement. If this agreement can be reached without going into the conciliation phase, so much the better and, if so, that is an objective I believe can be achieved in the processing of this directive, because Parliament has shown how it can play a full part in the legislative process by collaborating with other institutions, without the legislative procedure becoming unnecessarily lengthy because of it. The procedure, however, also has its problems, and perhaps the most important of them is the debating system in this Parliament. In contrast to what occurs in other parliaments, here we do not debate proposals in a contradictory fashion. Therefore it seems that any effort one may make to try to convince you that certain amendments are good or bad is a wasted effort. Even so, I cannot help at least trying to put across my reasons for opposing or proposing a vote against certain of the amendments that have been adopted by the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. I hope it will not be a wasted effort, because a thinker from my country used to say that wasted effort leads to melancholy, and at this time of night I do not want to get melancholic. I oppose adoption of Amendments 2 and 14 approved in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, and I am opposed more strongly than I can tell you to the content of Amendment 2, for various reasons. First, on technical grounds: the amendment tries to exclude from harmonisation certain possibilities that, if approved, would contradict other points in the directive. Other points, ladies and gentlemen, that were approved in the text and accepted by the Council and Commission as a consequence of this Parliament’s amendments at first reading. How are we going to adopt this amendment if it conflicts with our own texts? Secondly, but no less importantly: if, as Amendment 2 would have it, certain types of intermediary are to be excluded from harmonisation, this means, no less, that a large part of the sale of insurance contracts would fall outside the consumer protection mechanisms contained in the directive, and this should not be accepted.

Political group: PSE