Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-050"
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". – Mr President, I wish to begin by just reminding the House of a few statistics. There are at least 16 million businesses within the EU, 99.9% of them are micro to medium-sized. There are 100 million people working in the EU in the private sector and, of these, 32 million people work in micro-businesses, which is businesses of less than 10 people; 33 million people work in small to medium enterprises, with less than 249 people. So a total of 65 million workers in the EU are in the small and medium sector, which shows that it is very important for us to be discussing the growth of such a sector. In particular, it is absolutely right that this specific initiative – growth and employment – should be discussed within the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, although it is clearly also of interest to other committees.
This particular report is concerned with funding programmes, which was an important initiative from this Parliament a few years ago. But it is worth saying straight away, as confirmed at the Lisbon Summit, that the issue of the development of SMEs is not just a matter of funding. It is also very important that all of us secure the right climate for enterprise, with less red tape and less bureaucracy, to encourage SMEs and risk-takers to actually consider taking out risk capital in the first place.
1999 was the first full year of this particular set of initiatives and, therefore, as a start-up phase it should have been relatively straightforward to report upon this without being too controversial. However, there are some controversial elements in the report, essentially because of the Commission timetable in issuing its report. I have annexed the detailed timetable to the report. It shows that whereas the initial draft proposal from the Commission came out in November/December 1999, it literally took a full five months before the report came before Parliament. Then there was a further delay within Parliament, because we are not perfect in that respect either. It took over a month to allocate it to a rapporteur and then, because of the summer recess, it was not possible to programme the internal debate and discussion until October and November. Despite this long delay, there was further incompetence, dare I say, within the Secretariat because the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy under Mrs Flesch as the rapporteur had produced some very useful amendments to the report which only came to the Committee on Employment after we had voted on the report. So that again was not exactly impressive. I have agreed with Mrs Flesch that amendments from the committee today have my full support to go through unchallenged, as there are a number of useful contributions there.
I should add that I asked the Commission back in August about a particular comment in the report, which stated that in August there would be some feedback from SMEs about their response to the project. However, the Commission did not reply. I asked again in October where this information was and it finally replied: "What information are you waiting for? We do not understand!" It was literally only yesterday that I received an e-mail from the Commission stating that there was such information but it had been sent to the Committee on Budgets rather than to our committee – again, not too impressive.
Yesterday, I spoke in the debate on the Doorn report on SLIM concerning bureaucracy. I should like to reinforce those comments now, because the fact that this report had to go through so many different Directorates before it emerged – including legal, budgets, financial control, general secretariat, regional, innovation, employment and social affairs, research, internal market and competition – is not an impressive way of dealing with an important subject. I speak not only on behalf of this report but also, I am sure, of other reports that need to go through the same system. This is just too much micromanagement. There are too many managers involved and, as a result, the project ends up not being fully managed.
Finally, I have made a few comments about the European Investment Bank taking a controlling interest in the EIF. This may be absolutely right given its expertise, but we want to ensure that these particular projects are given the priority they deserve. I am not particularly confident but we shall watch to see how that goes. I have also called for a full audit, not because of any doubt about the financial probity, but just as a basic management control system.
In conclusion, may I say that the Commission has apparently already written the draft report for the year 2000. I should like to ask that we see it
so that we can make a positive contribution
in good time, rather than repeat the timing of the current report. Here we are in January 2001 debating and voting on a report that was issued back in 1999. It is already history. On such an important subject we want to deal with the present, thereby being better able to shape the future."@en1
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