Mr President, I would like to congratulate the previous speaker on her remarks, many of which I would have no difficulty at all in echoing myself. Indeed, I want to develop one of the themes that she touched upon in the early part of her remarks and that is the burden of red tape on small and medium-sized companies.

I always thought that this was a particularly critical problem in the United Kingdom until I began to compare notes with colleagues from other Member States and I discovered that the problem is just as grave there. In order to illustrate this Euro-problem, let me give one or two examples of what I mean. In the United Kingdom there is a distressing habit for the British civil service to add on obligations to European Community directives which weigh most heavily on small and medium-sized enterprises. Our Prime Minister has identified this and he refers to it as the habit of the British civil service in "gold-plating" European Community directives. I imagine that if we look into it we will discover that the German civil service, the French civil service and all the other civil services are busy doing the same thing.

However, the problem is not confined to national administrations, it is made worse at the local level. Certainly in my country we discover that all too often a small company is visited by a representative of the local authority who says: You cannot do that because Brussels has a rule which says you cannot. We look into it and we discover that Brussels has passed no such rule. Quite often we find that the national administration has passed no such rule and it all arises from the officiousness and over-zealousness of quite low officials at local authority level. We express this in the United Kingdom by saying that burdens on small and medium-sized enterprises are imposed by Whitehall, County Hall and Town Hall. That phrase could, I am sure, be translated into all the other working languages of the Community.

We need the Commission to carry out a detailed study as part of its deregulation exercise. We need it to carry out a study into how many extra burdens are imposed on small and medium-sized enterprises in our Member States by the tendency of local and national administrations to add on in areas like health and safety, in things like the environment, in things like employment because the small and medium-sized enterprises, as the previous speaker pointed out, are the engines of employment and the engines of the prosperity on which the European Community's future depends.