Mr President, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, I just want to shed more light on one aspect of the Sterckx report, the question of airspace control, air traffic control. I believe that paragraph 8 of the Sterckx report adopts the right approach, for we must look to the medium and short term. I shall begin with the medium term. In the medium term we must transfer regulative competencies for air traffic control to the European Union, something that is entirely feasible. There is no point in people coming along and saying, well, Eurocontrol has far more members and is far better. Eurocontrol does not work and that has been proven. One reason is that it operates according to the unanimity principle and the principle of the lowest common denominator. I think the European Economic Area sets a good example. If the Community of 15 has the authority to set regulations, and if 12 countries want to join the EU in the next few years, then we will have reached the figure of 27. If we follow the example of the European Economic Area with Norway and Iceland, then there will no problem with including Switzerland in the same system. We therefore need EU competencies in this area, so that we can decide by a majority on the basis of Community law, rather than having to abide by unanimity and international treaties. We also need private service companies to carry out the actual operations. I admit that Mr Sterckx would like to see the term “privatisation” replaced with “liberalisation”. I think we will be happy to endorse that. But we need competition, and, of course, he agrees with us on that. We must move away from a situation of monopolies and here I would like you to consider – although this is by no means a revolutionary idea – that if we have a single market on the ground, we could also have a single market in the skies, and that we should certainly allow different cooperating or competing service companies to control certain European aviation routes beyond the national borders, that we should move beyond the small-state mentality and offer services to airlines. We must go further in this regard. In any case, we will be discussing this again in connection with the Atkins report. I now turn to the short-term aspects. We are all grateful to the Vice-President for setting up a high-level working party with a view to achieving results in the short term too. I can only call on the 15 governments to instruct their civilian and military advisers to actually deliver solutions to the Vice-President by the end of the month, so that we will have something concrete to consider in June, and so that the Vice-President can respond to practical requests and take practical action, such as occasionally using military areas for civil aviation. We must therefore proceed with practical solutions, for we cannot have the same situation this summer as last summer: congested airspace, stacked aircraft, the pointless, constant combustion of kerosene in the air, i.e. environmental pollution of the first order! Let us hope that if the Member States really provide the Vice-President with what she wants, she can then present us with a good proposal that also includes short-term measures which can enter into force this summer.

Political group: PPE-DE