Jiří Maštálka, for the GUE/NGL Group. – (CS) Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on population and housing censuses presented by the Commission is a step in the right direction, like the previous proposals on statistics on health and safety at work and on job vacancies. I also agree with the Commission’s statement during the last population and housing censuses for 2001 that the collection of data from individual Member States based solely on ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ is inadequate for achieving sufficiently comparable results. It is therefore necessary to adopt legislation at European level. Only in this way can we guarantee the reliability, transparency and comparability of the results.

On the other hand, I was alarmed when I saw the list of data requested by Eurostat in section 1.3 of the annex to the proposed regulation. Even allowing for the fact that these are only recommended indicators, I believe that the Commission went too far in this respect. There are no grounds for asking people intimate questions about their private life. I was even more taken aback by the fact that this data was only to be collected from women. I therefore wholeheartedly welcomed the decision of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs to remove these intrusive and inappropriate requirements from the Commission’s proposal.

Such information is perhaps more appropriate in a medical centre. As far as the anonymity of this data goes, in my view it should be comparable to banking data. I think that in compiling any statistical information we must above all respect the protection of personal data and the privacy of individuals, and we must prevent a disproportional increase in the number of tasks required of the data providers. I will recommend that the GUE/NGL Group vote in this sense.