How does the work of the EU institutions affect the daily lives of those in the 28 member states? For many, the single market in goods and services has had a major impact. Nowhere is the positive public benefit more apparent than in transformed air transport. The liberalisation of air travel in the 1990s has brought huge benefits both to business and consumers.
By comparison, the pace of change in the telecoms sector has been slower and less dramatic. But, substantial progress has been made over the past decade in one key area. MEPs this week adopted a telecoms package that, by 2017, will ensure mobile phone users travelling within the EU no longer pay roaming charges on their calls. Consumers and businesses alike have long sought the elimination of these onerous surcharges, which, given the single market, are impossible to justify, and a barrier to its effective operation.
In recent years, under pressure both from the EU and irate mobile phone customers, roaming charges levied by the telecoms have decreased rapidly. A decade ago for an Irish mobile phone user in Paris to make a four-minute call home would have cost close to €5. From next April, the maximum roaming charge cost (per minute) for voice calls to any part of the EU will drop to 5 cents – and it will be abolished a year later.
This represents a further step taken in completing the digital single market. Mobile phones are no longer expensive luxuries – they have become indispensable necessities, and communication lifelines. The European Parliament’s decision to scrap the onerous surcharges also removes one of the major barriers in the digital single market.
The single market remains one of the EU’s outstanding achievements, but much more needs to be done to realise its full potential, and to ensure that goods, services, capital and people can move more freely. The removal of barriers to competition in the airline industry, and now in a key part of the telecoms sector, illustrates both what can be achieved and what remains to be done in order to create more opportunities for people and for business in developing the European economy.