Revision of Directive 96/67/EC on access to the groundhandling market at Community airports
21.3.2012
Question for written answer E-003062/2012
to the Commission
Rule 117
Jutta Steinruck (S&D) , Knut Fleckenstein (S&D) , Thomas Mann (PPE) , Petra Kammerevert (S&D) , Werner Kuhn (PPE) and Michael Cramer (Verts/ALE)
The Commission unveiled the ‘Airport Package’ at the meeting of the Committee on Transport on 24 January 2012. On the proposal for new measures to regulate groundhandling services, the Commission explained that this was necessary because quality and efficiency needed to be improved. This required further liberalisation and the opening up of the market to more service providers. On the need to improve quality, the Commission stated that three out of four delays were caused by groundhandling services.
Information has been received from the German airports indicating that only a very small, in some cases negligible, share of delays are caused by groundhandling services. The figure for Hamburg Airport is between 0.6 % and 0.8 % and for Frankfurt Airport, where conditions are considerably more complex, between 3 % and 4 %.
Can the Commission answer the following questions:
- —Are the statements from the Commission representatives based on specific studies and can the Commission make these available? These studies cannot be the ‘recent statistics’ mentioned in section 1.2. of the proposal for a regulation[1], which indicate that 70 % of delays are generated by turnarounds at airports. This does not refer to groundhandling services, as is evident from the communication from the Commission of 1 December 2011 on Airport Policy in the European Union[2] (see paragraph 13).
- —What proportion of delays are caused by the groundhandling services in other European countries, in particular in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands?
- —Does the German model with two groundhandling service providers in the airport offer better (service) quality than the models used at other European airports?
- —Does the Commission agree that, in this contradictory situation, Parliament should seek to conduct its own impact assessment ?
OJ C 118 E, 25/04/2013