mr president first of all on behalf of my group i particularly wanted to welcome all the reports but especially the report from mr grech for which i was the shadow rapporteur in the committee
i want to refer to some points on that in a moment but i just want to support what mrs berès said about the wide-ranging nature of the debate this afternoon
but on the other hand it is rather an unfocused debate
there are some really important contributions from many colleagues but frankly and i say this to the commission and commissioner barnier this also reflects the nature of the eu twenty twenty document
it has lots of great ideas but it is very unfocused and it is also very underdeveloped at this stage
he talked about the seven flagship initiatives
well we do not know the details of those yet
so the first point i make is please can we ensure that the council does not adopt in detail this proposal at its next meeting in june because it is not ready to be adopted
we need to spend more time on it together to work through the details
my second point is that i think we need to make the relaunch of the single market an eighth flagship initiative
that will not be overcomplicating things because it ought to be the number one initiative
colleagues you heard from mr grech that the potential is there to create jobs to encourage more innovation and to move towards a more sustainable economy but we need to get the support of citizens and consumers for this proposal
it was like the question addressed to mr karas just now by the earl of dartmouth
citizens need to buy into that process but it is there for them to do
they will get the benefits
we have this instrument of huge potential and particularly with public budgets still amounting to sixteen of the european economy why are we not using our public procurement budgets to drive innovation to buy those new technologies to encourage smes to take those up
it is the biggest single underdeveloped policy that we have
we heard from mr barnier and mr grech today and we made a contribution with mr monti's report
we have the instruments but we need to carry them out
