Mr President, I welcome this report and I welcome the Commission's public consultation on it. For those who are interested, the details are on the website.

If we are honest we all know the problems that long hours of work bring for health and safety, productivity and social relationships, both for the individual and within the family. A number of Member States, for example, are very concerned about children being left without appropriate adult care at times while their parents and carers are at work. We know that the 'long hours' culture, for whatever reason, brings strain, stress and potential breakdown.

I find myself in the interesting position of agreeing with Mr Hughes this evening, and certainly with most of what Mr Pronk said, about the 'on call' issue being resolvable, between social partners, in various sectors and in other ways. The issue about who owns your time, who controls it, who says where you have to be at what point, is a key question when deciding whether or not you are actually at work.

As for the dedication of doctors, yes, there is enormous dedication there but I do not feel safe at the hands of a doctor who has been on call for 72 hours and is swaying with tiredness while he is trying to make a decision how to treat me. That is a personal experience.

We are told that many people want to work longer hours because they really love their jobs – just as we all do. Good. But we also recognise that there is more to life than paid work. We are seeing again in certain countries a decline in voluntary work, for example, with all the repercussions that has for wider society.

We are also told that we need additional flexibility so that people can do overtime to earn a living wage. If this has to be done on a regular basis, I contend that there is a problem with the basic wage paid, rather than the right to continue compulsory overtime. We all know about the pressures exerted by teams to make sure you turn up for that overtime, whether you want to or not.

A lot of this debate sounds to me at times rather like gender discrimination: people claim it does not exist because they have never experienced it. Part of this is the question whether or not people have a real choice, say in the UK with its opt-out, as to whether or not they work longer hours.

We know of the enormous pressure exerted on people by employers, by methods of working, by just-in-time production, by a whole set of things such as the macho work culture that says you are not dedicated to your job unless you are in at 8 a.m. in the morning and still there at 10 p.m. at night. I am sure that a number of the staff in this Parliament will recognise that feeling.

The issue of flexibility is about who makes that decision. I would be happier with a lot of the UK's arguments if I felt there really was a concerted effort by the UK Government to apply the rules. But I do not see any evidence of this and it is not what I am hearing at meeting after meeting either.

Jean Lambert