Brussels, 20/03/2006 (Agence Europe) - Meeting on Monday in the “General Affairs” council, chaired by Ursula Plassnik, EU Foreign Ministers continued the preparation for the European Spring Council of 23 and 24 March on the basis of draft conclusions presented by the Austrian Presidency. The debate brought out several differences of opinion on the wording of certain passages in the text (notably those on the “services” directive and the free movement of workers from the new Member States) but also on the Presidency's general approach consisting of including a whole series of objectives with detailed figures in the Summit conclusions. It will now be up to the Presidency to draw its own conclusions and to prepare the draft text which it hopes to submit on Thursday.
It is known that the Presidency wants to base this European Council on the need to implement commitments on jobs and growth made at the 2005 Spring Summit. To this end, it wants the European Council to set “specific areas for priority action” for each country by the end of 2007. This should allow the launch in spring 2008 of the second round of the strategy. According to the draft text discussed on Monday, the priority areas are: - investing more in knowledge and innovation; - unlocking business potential, especially of SMEs; - increasing employment opportunities for priority categories; setting a European energy policy (the whole second part of the conclusions is given over to this: see later); - maintaining the dynamic within the framework of the three pillars of the partnership for growth and jobs.
While the general drift of the draft conclusions may be supported by all the delegations, a large number of Ministers nonetheless expressed strong doubts on a number of the objectives with figures which the Presidency wants to include in the conclusions. Thus, for example, the draft text calls on Member States to take measures to create “at least two million jobs in Europe by 2010” and also speaks of reducing the time it takes to set up a company to “one week” by the end of 2007. It also speaks about reducing giving up school to 10% and having at least 85% of young people aged 22 complete the full secondary school education. Another example is, by 2007, having every unemployed school leaver being offered within six months a job, apprenticeship, further training or some other measure to allow him/her to become part of the labour force. This timescale should be reduced to a maximum 100 days by 2010, according to the Presidency.
The second part of the text deals with the EU energy policy. To respond to the EU's various energy challenges, the European Council recommends an energy policy for Europe to reach three objectives: security of supply, competitiveness and environmental viability. The Presidency proposes to include objectives, backed up by figures, for the development of renewable energy - increasing to 15% the share of renewable energy by 2015 and biofuels to 8%. Once again, a large number of Ministers expressed reservations about the Summit committing itself to these quantitive objectives which did not feature in the contributions of the Energy Council of 14 March and the Commission's 8 March Green Paper.
The third part of the draft conclusions speaks of measures needed to maintain the dynamic in all areas: - guarantee healthy and viable public finances; - complete the internal market and encourage investment; - strengthen social cohesion; - ensure viable growth on the environmental level. Monday's debate was essentially devoted to the “services” directive. While the draft text presented by the Austrian Presidency points out that the Commission is to present its amended proposal soon, based in large measure on the European Parliament's first reading, virtually all the speakers, including France, the United Kingdom and Poland (for different, and sometimes diametrically opposed, reasons) considered on Monday that it would be preferable to refer to the conclusions of the Competitiveness Council of 13 March (see EUROPE 9150). These conclusions are more procedural and do not predict the contents of the Commission's amended proposal expected for the start of April. On Monday, only Germany and the Commission openly supported the Presidency's text, according to diplomats. This third part also refers to the free movement of workers from the new Member States, simply recording the Commission's recent assessment on the application of interim restrictions with regard to workers from Central and Eastern Europe. On Monday, the Ministers from the new Member States (led by Poland and the Czech Republic) called for this passage to be strengthened: Member States should not just take note of the Commission's conclusions, but take them into account when deciding whether or not to retain these restrictions on labour market access.