Hughes (PSE). – Mr President, I congratulate the rapporteur for his excellent work on the organisation of working time. As the Commissioner said, this is an issue which touches every worker and family within the European Union. However, although I clearly understand that individual Commissioners do not always get what they want when they want it, I am very disappointed with the way the issue of working time has been handled by the Commission as a whole. It had ten years to prepare and produce proposals on the operation of derogations on the opt-out and annualisation; the review and communication were clearly required by November 2003 and yet, incredibly, the Commission still managed to miss the deadline.

When the communication came, it was, quite frankly, hardly worth the paper it was printed on. It is a weak document and gives no clear signal on the best direction for action. It should not, in my opinion, be allowed to stand as a proper instrument for the opening of the first phase of consultation between the social partners under the procedure included in Article 138. I hope the social partners will make that clear.

Also, by the time the Commission got around to producing the communication, it was being bombarded with notifications from Member States that they would begin to use the opt-out in their health-care sectors in response to the SIMAP and Jaeger rulings. No doubt some Member States were being opportunistic in this respect, but the Commission had had three years to react to SIMAP; its inaction could therefore lead to the neutering of a central piece of EU health and safety law. In our view, a blanket spread in the use of the opt-out is not the answer to SIMAP and Jaeger. We want speedy and specific action from the Commission in response to those judgments and then time to sensibly revise other provisions in the original directive.

As to how we solve those difficulties, we could look to social partner agreements or re-rostering arrangements that have been put in place in certain parts of the EU to deal with the implications of those cases. Or we could look at the type of definition we adopted to cover the case of relief drivers and overnight ferry tripsin dealing with working time for drivers. As well as working time and rest time the notion of periods of availability was included there.

More generally, people like Mr Bushill-Matthews are constantly telling me that the opt-out is essential to give companies the flexibility they need to operate. It is strange then, in my view, that until recently only one Member State used this opt-out: the others were managing just fine and would still be managing in their health-care sectors if not for the SIMAP and Jaeger judgments. The truth is that the directive is flexible. More relaxed arrangements apply to a whole range of occupations and activities and the reference periods are generous. I for one would also be quite happy to look at whether annualisation of working time could be made a more realistic option in all Member States.

Overall, the Socialist Group takes the view that an opt-out from a health and safety directive is a dangerous nonsense. The possibility was created for purely political reasons ten years ago and it was a bad idea from the start. A general opt-out is bad for the welfare of workers, bad for a proper work-life balance, damaging to efforts to encourage women to return to the labour market and, as the statistics show, not at all helpful in the drive to boost productivity. It is not the direction a Union committed to transforming itself into the most dynamic, knowledge-based economy in the world should even think of taking.

So I, for one, will not repent and I will certainly not join Mr Bushill-Matthews on Wednesday.