Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-16-Speech-2-025"
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"en.20000516.2.2-025"2
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"Mr President, I congratulate Mr Ferber on his report. These types of reports are never easy and he has done a good job. My only criticism is that Amendments Nos 4 and 5 should have been tabled in someone else's name for the PPE Group. By saying that I am being consistent: I said the same to Mrs Müller in the Green Group when she did that. I shall explain why shortly.
Parliament demands that the Commission and the other institutions are prudent with taxpayers' money, and we think the same should apply to the European Parliament. As chairman of this committee, I have discovered that your loyalties are spread very wide. I have a loyalty to the committee, and when the committee takes a decision I feel duty-bound to defend that decision. I have a loyalty to the rapporteur, and that is why I have made the comments before because the rapporteur should reflect the opinions of the committee. I also have a loyalty to my political group which has given me this speaking time. This sometimes leaves me bereft of my own loyalties to myself and what I want to say. I was somewhat sympathetic to what Mr Dell'Alba was saying because we have to be careful of criticising everybody else if, at the same time, we are giving the impression that we are ignoring that prudency and just doing what we want to do. I am not saying that we have done that. However, if that is the impression we are going to give, we have to be very careful and realise the consequences.
Having said that, the Ferber report has tried to balance the needs of Parliament coming into a new millennium – new needs, enlargement on the horizon – and to make it function effectively. Not all the decisions will be taken when we vote this report through. The first reading will be time when the final decisions are taken, and cognisance has been taken of that.
When they see a budget of EUR 965m, the newspapers will easily deduce that is over EUR 1.5m per Member. The British newspapers will be full of GBP 1m per MEP – that is what they cost!
However, we are trying to reduce those costs, especially on buildings. If people would look at what is being done with the buildings: we are trying to reduce the payments over the shortest possible time, thereby reducing the total burden on Parliament's budget. One only has to look at paragraphs 15 to 18 to see how serious we are about the buildings policy. The policy of ramassage has been a great success for this Parliament. What we have done with the Belliard building may not be ideal but at least it is a step in the right direction, and it is now off our backs.
Finally, one of the great problems in our institution is that we have no statute for Members, assistants or political parties. What is being proposed is to try to make some headway towards resolving those factors."@en1
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