Schussel's Call For New Services Directive Unlikely To Be Heeded

by Ulrika Lomas, for LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

26 October 2005

Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schussel has suggested that a new draft of the controversial services directive be put together.

It emerged this week that a European Parliament vote on the services directive (often known as the "Bolkestein directive" after the Commissioner who first proposed it), which was scheduled for 4 and 5 October, has been postponed to 21 November.

This means that the first-reading plenary vote due at the end of October has also been put back and will probably now take place in January, under the Austrian presidency of the EU.

The Internal Market Committee was expected to vote recently on a report drafted by Evelyne Gebhardt, but following a series of closed-door meetings between the committee and various political groups to try to reduce the record number of amendments (at least 1,600) and hammer out a compromise on key points, the main bones of contention are still unchanged.

Speaking to the EU Observer following the Monday social summit at which Mr Schussel put forward his proposal, general secretary of the European Trade Unions Confederation, John Monks revealed that:

"The Austrian chancellor said we should rather have a completely new text of the services directive, and he received a lot of support from trade unions for it."

However, speaking to the news service on behalf of Internal Market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, a spokesman rejected the possibility of creating a new version of the legislation whilst the current one is still in the pipeline, observing that:

"It would be an insult to the European Parliament if we let it discuss a bill and at the same time started drafting a new proposal."

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