mr president it is particularly appropriate that mrs reding is responding for the commission tonight because my report is focused on a proposal that has been developed over a number of years with her services
it is an extremely important proposal which has wide-ranging possibilities for the whole of the european economy
my first message to the commissioner tonight is to thank her services for their leadership on this but to say that i think this initiative needs to be much better known
it needs to spread out widely from dg information society as i think it is now starting to do because it is of such importance particularly in the economic times we are in at the moment
so what am i talking about
well the core of the issue is that public authorities in the european union spend huge amounts of public money on buying products and services
it is estimated that eur one eight hundred billion is spent on public procurement every year
how much of that procurement is actually spent on investigating researching and encouraging the development of new solutions to the big challenges that public authorities and indeed society face every day a better health service a better transport solution dealing with climate change more energy efficient buildings
eu procurement spending linked to research and development is less than one of that total procurement budget
bearing in mind that we have an explicit objective in the lisbon strategy to move our r d spending up towards the three target there is huge potential here
that is where the whole mission of pre-commercial procurement comes in
essentially what we are looking for are intelligent research-focused public authorities to generate a demand for innovative solutions and then work with innovative companies large and small but particularly small enterprises who really can benefit from this to fulfil those requirements
we want those intelligent customers to really think ahead to be demanding to think about the solutions for which no commercial solution yet exists but where there are basically a range of solutions which can then be developed with the financial contribution from the public authority to do just that to fund research and development perhaps through a first competing stage of ideas and then take those development solutions to a next stage towards the viability of a product or service that can then be launched
the benefits of having that backing for a small enterprise in particular and giving that commercial support will be really important to that business
indeed where this has been already rolled out we see the experience where businesses even if they do not produce the winning solution have had an element of their research and development funded that they can then go on and use to develop other revenue-generating products
this also ties in with the second initiative from the commission covered in my report the lead market initiative where we are looking for public authorities to lead in a number of key technology areas around health and climate change in transport
there are signs of an integrated policy emerging but my report says that we need more training we need more best practice and we need more dispersion and dissemination of this proposal
i hope that the commissioner and indeed the college will pick up on this and that this parliament will show it is right behind this solution
in conclusion and if you will allow me a short amount of extra time because this is in a sense a point of order i want to point out first of all to this empty house that i had two opinions for my report from mr sakalas from the committee on legal affairs and mrs podimata from the committee on industry
they are of course not allowed to present those opinions here which seems rather a shame since they made valuable contributions which i have added to my amendments
i also want to thank my shadow mr hasse ferreira for working with me and he has also contributed extensively
just to wind up this is a solution where everyone will be winners society citizens public authorities business innovators and the european economy
that is why it is so important and why when we are looking to public authorities to continue investment in this time of economic crisis this proposal is even more important than it was when i started this report a few month ago
