That is exactly what the two White Papers seek to do. It is important to understand that the seven particular points of the action plan that I have referred to have already been assessed in Corfu. I suggest that we now need more specific proposals. You are quite right, of course: the ECOFIN Council, the Social Affairs Council and, more particularly from your point of view, the Temporary Committee on Employment, which is now sitting and whose meetings I have attended on two occasions, are making a very big contribution. The real contribution is to keep us on the right track. When they ask me what they should be doing, my answer is that they should be telling me where we are going wrong. I am looking for that kind of support from Parliament.

We have already said that we have listed as very important the whole question of access to lifelong training and learning. We also want to make a huge investment in human resource development, because at the end of the day, if we are going to be competitive, we have to be at the leading edge of technology. How do you stay there unless you have people trained, and not just those coming from the schools. You must also adapt your existing workforce because there is obsolescence built into an awful lot of the technology we are talking about today. So in five to ten years' time all of that technology will be obsolete. But the interesting statistic is that 80% of the people who will be using the new technology in five or ten years' time are already employed. So there is not much point talking about creating millions of new jobs in whatever area we can, while those who are in employment are falling off the precipice because they have not been upskilled enough. That was the real thrust behind Objective IV and behind

the Community initiative known as Adapt. That is why we have attached such great importance to it.

Now to the question about youth. The one thing I believe you hear when you go to your constituencies is parents asking you: is there a future for my son and my daughter, and can you give them a start in life? That is exactly the thinking that I had behind Youth Start, that we would get the work ethic put in place so that people did not leave school, leave their formal education, and suddenly join the dole queue. What we would then eventually have is an endemic situation. I want people to have an opportunity in continuing training, continuing education or the link of work experience, so that they do learn the work ethic and they do learn how to participate in society.

This raises the whole question of flexibility, because I am a great believer in people having choice. But remember one thing when we talk about flexibility and the possibility of creating more part-time jobs: this is not a means of getting people in at the lower end and paying them low wages, with little or no social protection, which has happened in the United States model. What we are saying is that, if we had that flexibility, they would have a guaranteed income pro rata to full-time employment and that they would get the same social protection as those in full-time employment. That is what we are talking about, and that is what we hope to achieve.