Madam President, of the four freedoms pertaining to the internal market, the free movement of persons, and particularly of workers, is the one that has been realised the least. One can dream of greater labour mobility and of lifting internal borders for those looking for work. For those who are actually involved in movement of this kind, the reality is often a nightmare. Few feel up to the task. Labour mobility in Europe is far too rare and far too little attention is given to those who do take the plunge. To the politicians in the capital cities, these people are often treated as a marginal issue that takes place at the national fringes, away from the hub. We, European politicians and policy makers, often hear the comment that we should not get involved in social security because it is a national issue. We should only confine ourselves to Regulation 1408/71. This Regulation, as its name suggests, is more than 30 years old and has become more ambiguous as time has gone on. Moreover, it took five years before there was some kind of agreement within the Council about the simplification proposal that the Commission submitted in 1998. This has been a laborious process and has not by any means reached completion, but, fortunately, clear guidelines have now been drafted for it. Since these have already been mentioned by others, I will not repeat them. I greatly value the work that the Commission and the Council's working parties have carried out and, needless to say, also our rapporteur, Jean Lambert, who has entered into very extensive consultations with these other bodies. Nevertheless, many problems still persist. I have the impression that we have solved many of those problems thanks to our amendments that have often been drafted in line with the Commission and the Council. However, there are two other important bottlenecks that affect the practical side of things. First of all, it is important to know what Member States will actually introduce within the scope of the Regulation and what exceptions and excuses they will dream up in order to circumvent the provisions. For that reason, the application regulation and annexes are of major importance. These have not been presented to us to date, but are being prepared in the Council. In my view, we should most definitely take this into consideration when we settle on our final opinion. As far as this is concerned, the Member States have been warned and, together with our colleagues in the national parliaments, we will keep a close eye on our ministers and council representatives in the process. Secondly, the problems in practice often touch upon other rules and regulations which do not strictly fall within the scope of the Regulation. This is in the case where, for example, in social security regulations, age limits are used or definitions for people for whom derived rights exist, that are based on family law in the Member States. Or something which is quite common in the Netherlands, combinations of general social security regulations which serve as a basis, alongside additional regulations that fall outside of the scope of the Regulation. Fiscal regulations are another major problem area. European coordination rules are lacking. There are only bilateral agreements between Member States, and these are often at odds with these fiscal regulations and fail to comply with the rules in the Regulation. This is a huge problem, particularly for the frontier workers who live in one EU country and work in another. The Commission has assured us that those problems cannot all be solved within the Regulation and this is why we have shifted a number of amendments from the articles to the recitals. This, however, does not mean that the Commission and the Council should take them less seriously. I should like to add this quite emphatically. On these points too, I expect the Commission – this may be a new Commission – to actually take powerful initiatives in the fullness of time, because it is at least as important to solve these problems as those in the current Regulation.

Political group: PSE