Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 13 September 2017 - Strasbourg

Accessibility requirements for products and services (debate)

  Marian Harkin, on behalf of the ALDE Group. – Mr President, as a member of the Disability Intergroup for the last 12 years, I and many colleagues in this House warmly welcome the publication of the accessibility act. I want to take this opportunity to thank our rapporteur, Morten Løkkegaard, for his commitment reaching a balanced text and ask colleagues to support ALDE amendments tomorrow.

Where we state that, first of all, Member States should be obliged to include the built environment under the scope of the directive; where we include people with functional limitations when assessing the burden on businesses; and where we propose to delete Amendment 78 to ensure the accessibility act will apply to other union acts such as public procurement and EU funds; we also wish to include SMEs within the scope of the act.

Is this proposal perfect? No it is not. But we have addressed the significant majority of the concerns of the Disability Forum. We also know that there will be resistance in Council to these proposals, so we need to give Parliament the strongest possible mandate tomorrow when they enter into negotiations.