As everyone will experience disability, either personally or indirectly when a family member acquires a disability, the council believes that disability should be a non-partisan issue, and we share our recommendations with all parties.

As a cross-disability organization, our network is open to people with all types of disabilities, and we work on issues of concern to persons with disabilities.

The proposed EU intervention is in line with the Lisbon Treaty, as it will specifically target policy failures such as the lack of coordination and effective networking and market failures such as information asymmetries which can only be tackled at EU level.

Significant functional deficiencies include severe visual disability, severe hearing loss, a motor disability or an organic disability, which prevent the student from accomplishing daily activities easily and limit his or her ability to study or work.

3. Where, as regards an accredited paying agency, one or more of the accreditation criteria are no longer respected or so seriously deficient as to affect the agency’s ability to fulfil the tasks set out in Article 6(1) of Regulation (EC) No 1290/2005, the competent authority shall put the agency’s accreditation under probation and draw up a plan to remedy the deficiencies found within a period to be determined according to the severity of the problem, which shall not exceed 12 months from the date on which the accreditation is put under probation.

Mr. Pierre Tremblay: I think that in any case, all of the agencies had deficiencies, there were deficiencies in just about every file, in the files that were given to Groupaction, perhaps in the ones given to Everest, and in the ones given to Compast, there were deficiencies in the system overall.