Andrew Duff fights to boost services

12.07.34pm GMT Wed 15th Feb 2006

Liberal Democrat MEP Andrew DUFF is joining the fight this week in Strasbourg to open up the service sector of the economy to competition. The European Parliament votes tomorrow (Thursday) on the controversial Services Directive whose aim is to extend the single market to services. In a statement today, DUFF says:

"The services sector is the largest and fastest growing sector of the economy. It is estimated that 600,000 new jobs will be created if the European Union succeeds in opening up services to cross-border competition. Employers in the East of England are looking to recruit skilled workers across the EU: they should be allowed to do so.

"At the moment, everyone from architects to plumbers find enormous bureaucratic obstacles in their way if they try to work in a member state of the Union other than their own. If MEPs get this law right, the whole European economy will benefit greatly and our promises made to central Europe when they joined the EU in 2004 will have been kept.

"Unfortunately, conservatives and socialists are trying to restrict the scope of the directive and to insert new clauses that would allow any country to block an EU worker from another country on protectionist grounds. The safeguards for environmental and consumer protection, health and safety, and training standards are all in the draft law already. Foreign workers will have to conform to national labour law, such as the minimum wage. There will be no 'social dumping' under this directive and the hostility generated by it is grossly exaggerated.

"I and my Liberal colleagues are fighting to rescue the law from being watered down. Freedom of movement to provide services is one of the cardinal principles behind European integration. We now have a chance to put it into practice."

ENDS/...