The transport ministers of eight Member States – Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Cyprus, Latvia, Malta and Romania – consider it “neither reasonable nor justified” to adopt the ‘mobility package I’ “in its current form” at this time of pandemic crisis.
In a joint letter sent on Monday 30 March to the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Croatian Presidency of the EU Council, the eight ministers therefore requested that the ongoing legislative procedure on this issue be suspended until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Validated at the end of 2019 by the Member States (see EUROPE 12395/7), the ‘mobility package I’ (posting of lorry drivers, driving and resting times, tachographs, cabotage and market access) still needs to be formally adopted by the EU Council.
In view of the current circumstances, it has been agreed for the time being that the formal position of the EU Council and its notification to Parliament will be adopted by written procedure once parliamentary proceedings have resumed as normal.
In this letter, of which EUROPE has obtained a copy, the ministers consider it preferable to wait until the crisis is definitively over so that they can “reassess the situation of the road transport sector” before taking action to implement the package. “The economic landscape of the EU will be surely a completely different one”, they insist, fearing that the application of the ‘mobility package I’ combined with the consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic “will literally bring many European road transport businesses to an end”.
They reiterate their opposition to the restrictions imposed on cabotage operations and deplore, inter alia, the fact that drivers are forced to return to their country of origin and take a long rest there, or to bring their vehicle back to the country of the Member State where the company is established. These measures, if they were to come into force, would, in their view, undermine the efficiency of transport operations.
“What can be a real threat to the transport sector today is the closure of borders, drivers being forced to queue for hours, being exposed to health risks, not having access to infrastructure and toilets. This is what can damage the sector and this is what we need to work on now, in a coordinated way”, the European Road Haulers Association (UETR) told EUROPE in reaction to the letter.
The Chair of the Transport Committee (TRAN) in the European Parliament, Karima Delli (Greens/EFA, France), for her part, said that the COVID-19 pandemic could not be “misused” to try to block the mobility package.
Last October, six of the eight signatory Member States invited the Council to “carefully reassess” the proposals related to the ‘mobility package I’ (see EUROPE 12357/4).
See the letter from the eight Member States: https://bit.ly/2w4yXO4 (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)