Mr President, Commissioner, small and medium-sized businesses, both in the manufacturing and in the service sectors, can only survive on the market if they have full order books. They only have full order books if they have clients, and these can, roughly speaking, be divided into three categories: firstly, large companies; secondly, private consumers and thirdly, the public sector. It follows from this that small and medium-sized businesses only thrive if unemployment is low and if public budgets at all levels are free of debt and have sufficient resources to commit to the investment budget. Within small and medium-sized businesses I should like to pay particular attention to the very small and micro-enterprises, because, of course, here additional specific difficulties compound the situation, in particular in manufacturing. These companies very rarely have their own research and development capabilities and the danger is therefore particularly great that they will be cut off from the development of new products and the further development of existing ones, that they will use antiquated technologies and that they will not adapt to the demand for increasing quality. In addition, very often – because the managerial staff are not adequately qualified – the opportunities for support, which are readily available here, are not exploited to the full. All of this is quite apart from the main problems which to this day have not been resolved: permanent undercapitalisation; very poor access to credit because they cannot provide the guarantees required in normal banking practice; markets limited to their respective regions and cash loss. This means that a policy focused on small and medium-sized businesses is needed, on the one hand to standardise the assistance programmes and on the other, obviously, to take account also of the specific interests and problems linked to company size, company structures, production lines and so on. Mrs Montfort's report constitutes a considerable improvement on the Commission proposal. People might almost think, Mrs Montfort, that you yourself were a committed SME entrepreneur. Your report is excellent. Nevertheless, I would have liked even more attention to have been paid to at least two economic trends. The first is a greater emphasis on – I do not say a change towards but a greater emphasis on – demand-driven economic policy compared with supply-side economic policy. Secondly, there has also been a power shift within investment policy towards investment for expansion and – to a lesser extent – towards investment in rationalisation. Looked at another way, this means that the taxpayer makes tax receipts available which companies use to rationalise. Then they put the people who used to work there out onto the street and say to the taxpayer, now it is up to you again to sort out what happens to these workers who have been shown the door. Surely this cannot be what economists want. It may seem perfectly acceptable from a business management point of view because of the profits that it can be expected to generate, but not from the point of view of the overall economy. I think that we in the European Parliament have a responsibility to the overall economy which takes precedence over our responsibility to the business economy.

Political group: GUE-NGL