Mr President, 30 years ago Ernst Schumacher said "Small is beautiful". Thirty years on, small is still beautiful when we consider Europe's business community, for if a major question for Europe is unemployment, then a major part of the answer, I believe, is the encouragement of small and medium-sized enterprises. It may be a quirky statistic, but a true one nevertheless, that there are something like 60 million small businesses in the European Union, and that figure matches very neatly the number of jobless within the European Union.

Any action to help small businesses is action to help Europe's jobless. Why are small businesses important? Because they are well placed to help European recovery. 75% of new jobs come from that sector. Small and medium-sized enterprises generate 70% of Community turnover. More people work for SMEs employing ten people or fewer than for large firms employing 500 or more. Indeed, more than 92% of Europe's businesses are SMEs.

Do they want our help? Yes, I think they do. But you would be surprised to learn that when you hear the Christian Democrats and the centre right in this Parliament. In my own country the stand-off approach of the United Kingdom Government - hands off, do nothing except to raise interest rates, which hits small businesses in particular - has been bad for SMEs. But in this Parliament, in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy, our Christian Democrat colleagues opposed action against the black market economy, which can so taint the work of SMEs. They voted against incentives to reinvest profits, which are meant to encourage jobs and growth. Absolutely extraordinary! I believe that we should listen to small businesses. They are the still, small voice of desperation and despair; they feel crushed between big business and big government. That makes it all the more important for this Parliament to listen, consider and act.

The Commission has therefore brought forward two important reports, the first on the fiscal environment for SMEs and the second on the integrated programme for SMEs. In the integrated programme two prongs are suggested. First of all, the aim is to make more transparent such existing programmes as the Community initiatives in the structural funds, or the training involved in LEONARDO, or the work of the EIB and the EIF. But there are still problems. When you tell many of the small businesses in my area, in Merseyside, about the structural funds, the Community initiatives under Objective I, they stare blankly at you because they know nothing about them.

We have to make a greater effort with LEONARDO, with training. We cannot simply say there is a training programme. We must make every effort to help the trainers get into the small businesses to give real help. Again, for all the desire on the part of the EIB and the EIF, with their ECU 2 billion of funds, they are too remote. The intermediaries have an important job to do in telling small businesses that funds do in fact exist to help them.

The second aim of the integrated programme is to illustrate best practice and to have it adopted. I will give you an example. The mutual credit guarantee schemes which flourish in about five of the twelve Member States are almost wholly unknown in the United Kingdom and other Member States. But because it provides better access to finance, because it provides better access to expertise in smaller businesses, that kind of scheme should be used as best practice and flourish elsewhere in the European Community.

All these proposals from the Commission are to be welcomed, as, too, is the desire to have a directive on cross-border payments, since 36% of firms are still being double-charged by many of Europe's ten thousand banks. This recognition by the Commission that we are now living in a single European market is an absolutely essential prerequisite for further action. But I would claim that the Commission is still a reluctant player on this stage. The Commission's reluctance is evident from the fact that the measures are only horizontal, there is no legal basis and there is no extra budgetary provision to back these two reports. We must do more. The Commission must act decisively to sweep away the legal and administrative red tape. By completing the internal market, we can have one set of rules for our small business to work by, and that set of rules must be widely publicized and very closely monitored. We can help by completing the internal market.

Let me conclude by saying that the most important statistic in the report is that 6% of small businesses in the European Union do not want to grow at the moment. We must have action. We must listen, consider and then act to ensure that small businesses flourish in the European Union of the future.