Home What's New Speeches & Articles Newsletter - Jul 2008 Biography Diary Contact Information Photo Album Parliamentary Highlights Publications Links MEPs' Transparency   Conservative Party Latest News from Conservatives.com Conservative Party Website
		Corporate social responsibility Plenary Speech - Tuesday, 12th March 2007 Mr. President: In this House we constantly talk about the Lisbon Agenda, which is supposed to make the EU the world's most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010. Commission President José Manuel Barroso likes to boast about his plans to control excessive regulation, to help enhance competitiveness of European economies. Yet this report as originally presented sought to create mandatory regulation of a wide range of areas of corporate activity, including employee relations and the environment. But these areas are already heavily regulated, indeed massively over-regulated, by EU legislation already on the statute-book. What we were proposing to do here was to double-up on existing regulation, with all the potential for ambiguity and confusion that this would create. Mandatory CSR would be hugely damaging to competitiveness for the whole of European industry, but especially so for the small and medium-sized enterprises to which we constantly pay lip-service, but which we constantly seek to strangle with oppressive, intrusive and unnecessary regulation. However there are now agreed amendments which firmly establish the voluntary nature of our CSR proposals, and I fully support those amendments. I agree with the rapporteur that we need to promote CSR, but we also need to protect the enterprise, productivity, competitiveness and wealth-creating capacity of the European economies. We also need to be aware of current best practice, and of the excellent work already done by major businesses in this area. Last summer I had the privilege of visiting the Gates Foundation in Seattle, which of course is run by Bill Gates of Microsoft. This foundation's spending on philanthropy exceeds the GDP of a number of small countries. Arguably it does more to relieve poverty and hardship in Africa that EU aid does. And because it is a private-sector organisation, its spending is hugely more efficient than EU aid initiatives. Mr. President, mandatory CSR will not work, but if the amendments for a voluntary approach succeed, then I hope to able to support the report.