Access to the international market for coach and bus services. Recast

The Council held a public policy debate on three legislative proposals1 that seek to modernise, replace and merge legislation governing road transport operators and access to the road transport markets (also see COD/2007/0098 and COD/2007/0099).

Ministers were invited to agree in principle to the outline of the presidency compromise package on the key elements of two of the three proposals.

The Council broadly supported the presidency compromise as a good basis for further work on these proposals and invited Coreper to pursue examination of the outstanding issues, with the objective of reaching a political agreement on all these proposals at the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in June 2008. The presidency compromise focuses, in particular, on two main issues, namely cabotage and national electronic registers.

All member states welcomed the Commission’s proposal aimed at revising and consolidating the current legislative framework on access to the international market for coach and bus services. They agreed on the need to simplify and further harmonise the current rules by eliminating legal uncertainty, reducing the administrative burden and improving the exchange of information.

The technical examination of this proposal will continue in the working party. However, as delegations identified in this proposal similar issues to those in the two previous proposals, they agreed to also apply, as appropriate, the solutions found for the relevant articles of the market access proposal and the transport operator proposal to the coach and bus services proposal.