SITTING OF WEDNESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2003
Lambert (Verts/ALE). - Mr President, I will begin by responding to the
comment from Mr Bushill-Matthews. Firstly, Birmingham City Council is a Labour
council, not a socialist council. More importantly, his comment raises many
questions about the current employment practices of councils within the UK.
A lot of the information we have received, for example from the low pay unit, indicates that many of the people working through agencies at the moment are poorly paid, poorly protected and very badly served. We need to look at this clearly. For example, the school where I used to work has now brought back in-house its cleaning staff because it can pay them more and it works out cheaper than employing them through an agency. So there is a win-win situation.
But the question I particularly want to raise with the Council and Commission
this morning is linked to the issue of sustainable development, which is an
overarching and not just an additional concept, and the place of Göteborg
and not just Lisbon within this whole process. Since Johannesburg, private companies
have been seen as a means of delivering government policy. There is a need to
think again about corporate social responsibility and a strong legal framework
for this when examining how companies behave in emerging democracies or countries
with repressive regimes, often backed by governments through export credit guarantees.
We need to ask them to look at this and assess whether the present 'free for
all' really encourages sustainability, democracy and openness in many of the
regimes and countries within which they are operating.