Transport Ministers of EU Member States meeting in Council will approve, on Monday 3 December, a very modest progress report on the Commission's proposal on the sharing of electronic freight transport information.
This progress report echoes the Commission's proposal for a Regulation, published as part of the third ‘mobility’ package on 17 May, which aims to digitise the information required by national authorities to carry out cross-border freight transport operations (see EUROPE 12022). This text proposal was essentially technical.
The national delegations of the Working Party on ‘Transport - Intermodal Questions and Networks' examined the Commission's impact assessment at the beginning of this semester, but no draft compromises were put on the table by the Austrian Presidency of the Council. Some of them, while supporting the objective of the text, questioned the cost impacts, the consistency with EU customs rules and the scope of the future regulation.
But work on draft compromises and suggestions will now be entrusted to the future Romanian Presidency of the Council.
European Parliament. On the European Parliament side, the draft report by Claudia Schmidt (EPP, Austria) was discussed in the institution's ‘transport’ committee on 21 November and is currently under discussion.
In this draft report, the MEP states that she supports the Commission's “long overdue” proposal. However, Ms Schmidt considers that the scope of the proposal does not cover enough areas, and wishes to extend it to include other types of information, as well as recommending that the transmission of electronic information should become the rule.
She also stresses the need to have access to digital information as part of the controls that it considers essential.
Ms Schmidt also wishes to see the rapid introduction of eFTI (electronic freight transport information) platforms to facilitate the implementation of the future text. Finally, emphasis is placed on the adoption by the Commission of delegated acts rather than implementing acts in the implementation of the Regulation. (Original version in French by Lucas Tripoteau)