The Commission has just published a 478-page study entitled ‘Monitoring Consumer Markets in the EU’. This extremely detailed analysis is a real market study of products and services, financed by DG SANCO. Its readers, particularly retailers and distributors, may learn that, for instance, ‘meat products performed poorly compared to the used car market’ or that ‘7.5 % of meat product consumers experienced problems in 2011, up from 7.4 % in 2010’. This study includes thousands of other pieces of information in the same vein, including changes from one year to the next in tenths of a percentage which are of no interest to consumers, either in terms of providing information or in terms of helping them resolve problems.

 

Can the Commission indicate:

 

1.     What is the total amount spent by DG SANCO on this study, including the previous market studies?

2.     Is this study different from the seven ‘Consumer Market Scoreboards’ already financed by DG SANCO and what was the budget for these?

3.     How long does DG SANCO intend to carry on with such frivolous expenditure, wasting money taken from an already depleted budget and carrying out studies of such little interest to consumers in their daily lives and concerns, at the expense of European consumer centres and organisations which are so desperately short of means for resolving citizens’ problems and lawsuits?

4.     Why are these market studies not financed, if necessary, under the single market budgets?

Associated media

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