On Monday 20 February, the Commissioner for the Internal Market and Industry, Elżbieta Bieńkowska, did not mince her words during a public discussion on motor vehicle approval and market surveillance revision.
The Commissioner did not hesitate to oppose the view of the Maltese presidency of the Council of the EU. Introducing the discussion, the latter welcomed the progress made at the Council on this dossier, whereas the Commissioner repeated her annoyance about the slow progress in the negotiations at the Council. The Commissioner was quite clearly displeased and explained that the national governments had not changed their attitude at all since the beginning of “Dieselgate”, similarly to the car industry, which she had already stated to MEPs (see EUROPE 11722).
Following contributions by several delegations criticising the excessive role envisaged for the Commission in the field of surveillance, the Commissioner came back fighting and insisted that this was not a question relating to “subsidiarity” but rather, efficiency to ensure “uniform” application of European law. She hammered home the fact that, “the current system is not at all credible” and she demanded that an agreement to be struck soon and concluded during her intervention that, “you are sending out very bad message to the public”.
The Maltese Presidency appeared somewhat perplexed in this regard and repeated its wish to reach a general approach during the competitiveness Council in May.
Contributions by member states. Several delegations intervened to reveal an east-west division. France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, seemed to be by and large in favour of the European Commission proposal. Latvia and the Czech Republic expressed doubts about the benefits from setting up an information exchange forum or a peer group assessment for the approval systems.
According to the information we gathered regarding the discussions held at the “Motor vehicle – technical harmonisation” working party, three major groups of member states began to take shape: the first group wanted to maintain the status quo (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Luxembourg and Italy); the second group supported the Commission proposal but with a few qualifications (France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom) and finally, Germany, appeared to be opting for something between the two (see EUROPE 11728).
Following the Volkswagen scandal, the European Commission decided to respond as quickly as possible and in January 2016 proposed a revision of the European regulatory framework to strengthen motor vehicle market surveillance (see EUROPE 11476). Since then, the reputedly extremely complex dossier has been going forward very sluggishly at the Council, much to the dissatisfaction of the European Commission, which is increasingly losing its patience (see EUROPE 11678).
The European Parliament recently reached an agreement at the internal market and consumer protection (IMCO) committee on the report by Daniel Dalton (ECR, United Kingdom) (see EUROPE 11722). The report is expected to be put to a vote in the April plenary. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)