CESI meets Barnier on public services in Europe

On September 1st, a delegation of CESI officials had the occasion to discuss on the future of public services in Europe with Commissioner Barnier. Secretary General Müllers expressed CESI's attachment to high quality public services. CESI will pay attention to initiatives coming from the European Commission, and Müllers asked Barnier details about the upcoming Communication on services of general interest. The CESI delegation was particularly interested by the definition of "essential services", which should be in its opinion defined at national level and notified to the Commission. Barnier assured that this question is still open, but a common European framework is not excluded.

From left to right : Hugues de la Motte (European Commission), Raymond Hencks (CGFP), Anne-Claire Le Bodic (CESI), Helmut Müllers (Secretary general CESI), Michel Barnier (European Commissioner), Klaus Dauderstädt (Vice-president dbb), Olivier Guersent (Head of Cabinet European Commission)

Klaus Dauderstädt (dbb) underlined the crucial role of public services which help attenuating the social effects of the crisis and are an important employer for all national labour markets, a view shared by Commissioner Barnier. For CESI, this essential role is not enough taken into consideration in current EU documents, including the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Single Market Act. For CESI, liberalizations have often harmed the quality of the services delivered to users and of the jobs in the sector. CESI expressed its interest in participating in the postal stakeholders' forum, which will aim at evaluation the effects of liberalizations in this sector. For CESI, this type of evaluations should be extended to further sectors. Commissioner Barnier agreed on the interest of having an evaluation made by all actors and not only the European Commission.

Finally, stating that more and more EU-citizens face difficulties to pay for essential services, Raymond Hencks (CGFP) asked for social rates in this field. The Commission could draw example from what it did on roaming and transpose it to sectors like electricity, gas or water. The Commissioner expressed his interest for this idea. He also confirmed that he will pay attention to developments of access to minimum banking services: if the voluntary system which has been introduced fails, it would become mandatory.

Download PDF