Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-12-Speech-2-046"
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"en.20020312.3.2-046"2
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"Mr President, I suppose that the total absence of the Council must be a mark of respect so that we feel more comfortable during our own debates.
Mr President, I will focus on the aspects relating to the financial perspectives. The 2002 budget has hardly begun to be implemented and we are already preparing for the launch of the 2003 budget and we can see that many of the problems of the last three financial years are reappearing, perhaps even in a more serious form.
The financial perspectives are even less sufficient for the requirements. An exponential increase in activities is expected within a financial framework which has seen hardly any arithmetical growth.
Ladies and gentlemen, on this issue, the great innovation of the 2003 procedure is that heading 5 – administrative expenses – is also bursting at the seams. In 1999, when we negotiated the current interinstitutional agreement, we managed to modify the figures in heading 5, but with perspectives which, as a result of shortsightedness, are now insufficient.
The general forecasts, including those of the Council, exceed the ceiling of the financial perspectives by EUR 125 million, with the contribution of a growth of 9% for the budget of the Council, which will now ask for cuts, while criticising the bad execution of some policies.
I would like to avoid cheap demagoguery, amongst other things, because there are no vast numbers of officials in Brussels, where the number of bureaucrats is less than those in the municipal authorities of Berlin, Stockholm or Madrid.
Heading 4 – external policy – is still inevitably doomed to failure. Every year we have forced the flexibility instrument in order to implement external policy. Now we are attaching increasing importance to the fight against poverty, which is a great thing, but which is essentially, in the current context, a reflection of the bad conscience of the wealthy Europeans, but we are not implementing external policy. And that is an issue of enormous concern to me.
Finally, ladies and gentlemen, heading 7 poses a serious problem which is very easy to understand. Heading 7 – pre-accession – since 2002 only had to assist the five countries which were not then Members. And now, Mr President, we have ten candidate countries which are sharing the money intended for five, without taking account of the fact that Malta and Cyprus, on a whim of the Council, come within heading 4.
All of this should be reviewed, Mr President."@en1
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