Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-12-11-Speech-2-113"
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"en.20011211.7.2-113"2
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".
Mr President, I would firstly like to apologise to the House because I must leave, since I have obligations in my capacity as Vice-President in a few minutes time and I will not therefore be able to attend the whole of the debate.
The report which I have just had the honour of presenting deals with an important contribution to the Community’s budgeting and programming system. We had an agreement, based on the joint declaration of 20 July 2000, in which we established a system for programming and verifying the activities of the Commission in relation to the Financial Perspectives. Its objective was to serve as a guide for the decisions of the Budgetary Authority, offer a vision of the margins available in each heading, taking account of the contributions already approved during the codecision procedure, and facilitating the application of the new assessment procedure originating from the aforementioned joint declaration.
We are now in an important financial year and, for the first time – we will thank the Commission for this – it offers us this opportunity to see the programming of Headings 3 and 4, in relation to our activities. There is an issue which interests us, a very methodological issue, on how to plan, in the future, the programmes which are already under way, and there is just one point which interests us: for certain programmes, for certain budget lines, future inflation is included, by means of what the Commission calls a budgetary deflater, and, in our opinion, it ought to be a budgetary inflater.
There is a technical contradiction here. The Financial Perspectives are expressed in standard euros, while the programming works in current euros for each year. The result is that we do not really know, when we reach an agreement, what value we may have for the previous year because it will depend on real inflation. Anybody who has been a trade unionist knows that one can lie through statistics in many ways and this is one of them – by mixing current prices with standard prices; and I will not therefore insist on this.
I am going to give you an example – by hiding future inflation in the framework programme, the Commission reaches the conclusion that, according to its figures, between 2002 and 2006, we will have an increase in annual contributions of 14.3%. Inflation is hiding the fact that, basically, we really only have an increase of 4.9%. This is the real increase. The rest, which brings it up to 14%, is inflation. That is what we do not like.
The other day, the Commission told the Committee on Budgets that, with the euro, inflation is dead. Praise the Lord! I accept that, but I am from the school of Saint Thomas and prefer, when it comes to these things, to see before believing. When I have seen that inflation has disappeared, I will accept the removal of this type of differentiation between standard prices and current prices and, therefore, this is the main issue from our point of view. All the rest of the Commission’s work we believe to be excellent. Our concern is really to prevent a situation where, through this technique, the higher real inflation is, the greater the margin available will be.
It makes no sense and therefore our request, included in the motion for a resolution, is very simple: if it suits the Commission to continue working, for whatever reason, in terms of current euros, it should do so, but the information it offers Parliament must also be expressed in standard euros. This is the key point of our report. As for everything else, I would like to thank the Commission for the effort it has made to offer us this information for the first time."@en1
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