Debate: Commission Work Programme
Date: TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER 2022
Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič
Language: EN

If you would allow me to be a little bit more concrete, I would also like to thank the honourable Members and subscribe to what Mr Olbrycht said that indeed we had good cooperation and a good exchange of views between the committees, between the Conference of Presidents, and I think that such good cooperation, that this spirit of partnership, would be very important this year and the whole of next year because, as Mr Olbrycht rightly points out, now we are working for the legacy of this legislator, of this Parliament. The people will judge us in the future on how we managed to cope with these unprecedented crises: COVID-19, economic challenges, Russian aggression against Ukraine, and how we demonstrated that we can adapt to these new challenges and the new situations. And I think that if you look at it from the perspective of how we dealt so far with the crisis, we managed the COVID-19 situation, we introduced the Next Generation EU budget, we are really coming up with unprecedented proposals when it comes to energy. And we will have a whole-morning discussion on this tomorrow, and the discussion on this package in the College in the Commission was just about to conclude as I was leaving to meet you and address the plenary on our Commission work programme. So we will have the whole debate about this tomorrow. But I can confirm to Mr Olbrycht that, yes, another analysis and revision of the MFF will be presented in the second quarter of the next year. This will give us an opportunity to look at how we managed with the MFF that we have at out disposal, how it works in combination with Next Generation EU, and what are the challenges we have to meet in this regard in future years to come. To Mr Marques, I again would like to reassure you and, of course, the S&D Group that the social dimension is very important to the European Commission. We are already preparing for what most probably will be another social summit to be held again in Porto in the spring of next year. And that when it comes to the concrete deliverables, you are very aware of the action plan on how to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights, which was adopted and which we are gradually fulfilling and bringing to fruition one by one, and we will definitely continue with that. What I think would be very important – and this would be my request to the whole European Parliament – tomorrow we will be debating the energy situation. Mr Papademos and also several other honourable Members asked to intervene on this topic. So you will see the package we are proposing. But I think what will be very important for all of you, especially for citizens of Europe, is how can we help them also financially in this very difficult situation when it comes to the vulnerable households, when it comes to the to the SMEs, when it comes to big industry. I think for the SMEs and households, we would have a recipe for how to help. But we need your assistance to get REPowerEU to be finally adopted by the Council and the Parliament. We need to push it over the finishing line because it creates the possibility to use the financial firepower we have to help SMEs and households. And it would be my plea that we should treat this file as the top priority of all of us, because that is the vehicle we can use to help the SMEs and to help the households, and to liberate space for the governments across Europe to use State aid to help the energy-intensive industries, because we know that it’s very important. I totally agree with Mr Azmani that we should be masters of our destiny. We should be those who shape the world, because we Europeans value human rights, we value the rule of law, we are fighting for the environment, we are fighting to make sure that rules and international law are respected across the world. And for that we need to do much more, we need to be – I totally agree with you – more autonomous, stronger in energy, stronger in critical raw materials, to be sure that we can invest even more and become stronger when it comes to all future-oriented new technologies – be it renewables, be it hydrogen or be it electric vehicles. To come back to Mr Marques on some of the concrete responses on social policies and social measures, I think one which will be clearly felt by every single citizen across Europe is our proposal, which we are going to present to you, to digitalise and create a European social security pass. This would be something like a European social card, which would again help our citizens to use the freedoms of the European Union, offer the guarantees, increase the flexibility of how they can benefit from the size of the European labour market. And we are also looking in great depth at how SURE was used. What are the results, what are the conclusions and how can we use that experience for our future work? Mr Azmani also referred to the trade agreements. You will see from our Commission work programme that we would like to push further our cooperation in the field of trade with Chile, with Mexico, with New Zealand, with other countries too, just to simply make sure that we remain this very important trading superpower that we are, and to bring also our approach with a new type of trade agreement where we take care of sustainable development, high-quality environmental standards and respect for social standards too. To respond to Mr Lamberts, I totally agree with him that the future is electric, and you know how much we have worked on this through our European Battery Alliance. It would seem we set a very good example because we see the focus the United States of America is putting on this very technology. We have to make sure that we would be absolutely competitive in that regard. Concerning REACH, right now we are finalising our impact assessment, we are finalising our consultations with the key stakeholders and we are also creating the space, a good feed-in, for our regulatory scrutiny board. I can assure you that once this file is ready, we will not hesitate to present it to Parliament and to the Council. If you allow me to close with one additional request: if you would look through our annexes, you will find not only the annex about what we want to do next year, but also one on the pending files which we now have at different stages of trilogues. It’s 116 files. 116 files! So I think that we again have to talk between us, the two communitarian institutions, the European Parliament and the Commission, on how we are going to accelerate the work on these spending files. So that next year, when I come to see you, we can say that this list is much shorter, that we delivered on the spending files and that we would focus on the right priorities and we will have the next occasion when we will be working on this joint declaration of priority files for the next year. So to repeat my two requests at the end: REPowerEU and pending files, because this would help us to move to better territory and to respond to the expectations of our citizens.