The Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety unanimously adopted the report by Karin SCHEELE (PES, AT) amending - at 1st reading of the codecision procedure - the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Community statistics on public health and health and safety at work.
The Parliamentary committee has made the following amendments to the report:
- the need to take into account the increase in the proportion of women on the labour market and to respond to their specific needs in relation to policies on health and safety at work has been emphasised;
- the Commission should be empowered to determine definitions, subjects and breakdown (including variables and classifications - inter alia, where possible and necessary, classifications by gender and age), sources whenever relevant and provision of data and metadata (including reference periods, intervals and time limits);
- it is important that gender and age be included in the breakdown variables as this allows the impact of gender and age differences on health and safety in the workplace to be taken into account. Since these are measures of general scope designed to amend or delete nonessential elements of this Regulation, or to supplement this Regulation by the addition of new non-essential elements, they must be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny provided for in Article 5a of Decision 1999/468/EEC.
The committee calls for complementary financing for the collection of the data in the field of health and safety to be provided in the framework of the Community programme for employment and social solidarity (PROGRESS). Within this framework financial resources should be used to help Member States in further building up national capacities to implement improvements and new tools for statistical data collection in the field of health and safety at work.
MEPs call for the statistics to include, in the form of a minimum data set, information required for Community action in the field of public health, for supporting national strategies for the development of high-quality, universally accessible and sustainable health care as well as for Community action in the field of health and safety at work. They also call for statistical methodologies and data collections to be developed for the compilation of statistics on public health and health and safety at work at Community level to take into consideration the need for coordination, whenever relevant, with the activities of international organisations in the field, in order to ensure international comparability of statistics and consistency of data collections. Within the European Union, studies and surveys of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work and of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions should be taken into account. Outside Europe, cooperation with the United Nations, and especially with the International Labour Office and World Health Organisation, should be further enhanced.
Lastly, MEPs amended the annexes to bring them into line with the amendments made to the body of the text: