Furthermore, cooperative building societies which are covered by the Act on cooperative building societies (17) may also benefit from the tax deduction.

Housing cooperatives hold a significant share of the housing market in the cities, in Oslo the market share is close to 40 %, the national average being 15 %.

In addition, the scheme covers only those cooperatives specified in draft Section 10-50 of the Tax Act, namely certain consumer cooperatives, cooperatives active within the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors and cooperative building societies.

We therefore register our disappointment that our proposal to support housing cooperatives was not included.

Consequently, a country that is not considered to be anti-liberal, namely the Netherlands, has been brought to book for having committed, and I quote, ‘a manifest public-service error, because the subsidised social housing cooperatives counted among their tenants households that were not socially disadvantaged’.

It is disappointing to note that most of the specific problems, such as sources of finance, international cooperation, the modernization of national legislation and even the need to link voluntary organizations/foundations with developments in the information society, would no longer arise or would be much less acute if these bodies were equipped with an instrument of cooperation at Community level: we are of course referring to the Statute for a European Association which Parliament has called for in two reports drawn up by this committee- see the FONTAINE Report on non-profit-making associations (Doc. A2-196/86) and the VAYSSADE Report on a Statute for a ...[+++] European Cooperative Society and other undertakings in the mutual sector in general (Doc. A3-312/90) - and it approved the proposal for a regulation relating to that statute through the VAYSSADE Report which concerned the statutes for a European association, European cooperative society and a European mutual society (Doc. A3-0001/93) OJ C 42 of 15.2.1993, pp. 84 to 122).