It goes without saying that any revision of the Machinery Directive will have a significant impact on the European economy as a whole due to the size of this sector of our industry which has an output of some 407 billion Euro and exports outside the EU of some 113 billion Euro per year.
Industry's reaction was therefore essentially negative because, although there were minor improvements that could be made to the existing directive, we felt that carrying out a revision only five years after the last country had effectively put the present directive into force, was much too early.
Moreover, although the new draft prepared by the Commission clarified certain issues, it created, in our opinion new grey areas and once again added unnecessarily to the administrative burdens, which companies have to face.
Orgalime's objectives have been to ensure that if new legislation is finally adopted, it should reflect the needs of our industry and not give rise to a range of new administrative burden.
Orgalime therefore started an intensive lobbying campaign and provided continuous input into the legislative process as it developed.
We also participated actively in work at the European Parliament where, after making a presentation at the EP's hearing on the issue, we provided substantial input into the report adopted at the first reading of the EP
In the Council working group (which includes representatives from national ministries managing the application of the existing directive) work progressed fairly slowly as officials discussed many areas of this complex proposal. Orgalime was always in contact with the Presidencies of the Council in order to follow the progress and provide input from our industry. We also wrote to the different governments soon after work in the Council working group got under way expressing our opposition to the revision of the directive while at the same time providing technical input to the areas we felt were most critical.
However, on 24 September 2004,
after nearly four years of debate in the Council working group,
the Competitiveness Council unanimously reached a political agreement on the draft Directive on technical harmonisation for machines amending Directive 95/16/EC, a text, which had been significantly re-drafted.
Although Orgalime would have preferred to leave the situation as it was, we nevertheless welcome the fact that the institutions have gone a long way to respond to our complaints.
At the present time the process is pending, awaiting a formal adoption of the common position at one of the Council's forthcoming meetings. Once formally adopted, the Council Common Position will be forwarded to the European Parliament for second reading.
Since we believe that the Council common position provides for a reasonable compromise in general, which is acceptable to our industry and, after many years of discussion, provides a way forward for this proposed Directive, our present objective is to keep the text as stable as possible . We therefore hope that the European Parliament will see fit to propose as few amendments as possible.
Nevertheless we feel that there are still some specific points we believe could be subject to improvement and Orgalime is lobbying the Parliament in order to have our proposals for amendments included in the text. We now hope that a few points which we would still like to see changed before adoption can be discussed and accepted by the institutions before second reading.
|
