Huhne (ELDR). – Mr President, my group is broadly supportive of Mrs van den Burg's efforts on her report. Therefore, if she will excuse me, I shall concentrate on the Lamfalussy procedure extension. This group is in favour of extending the Lamfalussy procedure to banking and insurance. You have only to see the detail of the decisions being taken in Basle on banks' capital adequacy to realise that it would be a nonsense to incorporate them into primary legislation. Our American counterparts have already allowed the introduction of all the Basle decisions by secondary legislation and to delay unnecessarily would put European banks at a competitive disadvantage.

However, the Council of Ministers sometimes seems to have forgotten two important things. First, that Parliament is fully committed to the democratic oversight of committees that establish implementing legislation. Secondly, that the deal on applying Lamfalussy committees to the securities market was a strictly temporary measure, which is why there are four-year 'sunset clauses' agreed by the Council in both the prospectus and the market abuse directives. Temporary means temporary. If our democratic role in monitoring is to be effective, Article 202 of the Treaty must reflect codecision over implementing committees, otherwise there will be always be a bias in this House against the delegation of powers that are necessary to deal with some extremely technical matters.

For the sake of good governance and democratic oversight, the Member States should commit themselves – whether in a Council declaration or elsewhere – to a revision of Article 202, which not only introduces equivalent powers for Parliament and for the Council but also ensures there is proper oversight by this House and by the Council. Then we can proceed to extend Lamfalussy, again on a temporary basis.