Well IMCO (the EU Internal market and consumer protection committee) had a bit of a debate yesterday about the findings of the new Impact Assessment into ABS, On Board Diagnostics and the timeline for the introduction of new emissions limits.
Remember, they elected to vote back in December, ahead of seeing these results.
When the results came out last week, they broadly found against the decisions IMCO had taken, for example, that cost/benefit of compulsory ABS was negative and by a big margin and shouldn’t be imposed on all bikes from 50cc up as MAG has always said.
Yesterday’s debate was interesting in that pretty much every MEP who spoke criticised the Impact assessment, said its findings should be ignored and that it was a waste of time and money! And voting before it was even completed wasn’t?
So in essence, they were prepared to vote based on assumptions, but when a report that they commissioned found against their decision, they don’t want to listen to it!
In fairness, they are correct in many ways that the Impact Assessment was not a quality one, but then they commissioned it and chose who would carry it out…
This opens a huge can of worms now though, because parts of it are very closely based on the original assessment the EU Commission conducted in support of the introduction of whole Regulation in the first place.
Everyone acknowledged that it was substandard then and the UK Government even conducted its own because it had no faith in the findings. The IA is of course only one part of the supporting evidence which is necessary to support the introduction of legislation and we know that most of the other research is flawed too – the EU Commission itself stating that it didn’t have baseline data for much of what it wants to introduce – so this leaves us in a funny place, where MEPs appear to accept something substandard one minute, but refuse to the next, even if in some cases, the findings are based on the same shoddy work!
The good news (because there always is some) is that this disarray looks like we are going to get more time to lobby our MEPs, as the whole Parliamentary vote is now bound to be delayed into the summer, leaving MAG the opportunity to express ourselves on the streets as well… It has to be a multi-pronged attack to keep the pressure up.