Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-02-Speech-2-017"
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"en.20020702.1.2-017"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, it is natural that we should at first ask ourselves whether it makes sense for one half of the budgetary authority to be using a parliamentary debate and a parliamentary resolution to set down its strategy for a conciliation procedure before the Council's first reading. I would fundamentally question Parliament's wisdom in doing this in view of the relative emptiness of the Council bench. What we are discussing here is not going to find its way over to the other half of the budgetary authority.
I am nonetheless very grateful to Mr Färm for giving us this opportunity to consider our overall approach to the 2003 Budget year long before discussions on individual Budget lines take place. Let me just make a couple of observations. Firstly, Commissioner, my view of a supplementary Budget by which we return EUR 15 billion – that is far in excess of 15% of our Budget – to the Member States, is that it is somewhat comic. On the other hand, in order to draw up the 2003 Budget, we find ourselves having to mobilise the flexibility instrument to secure administrative expenditure – that is, in one of the areas where it does not belong. Something is wrong here. This has relatively little to do with the requirement that the Budget be true, clear and transparent, or with all the theoretical things we spend our time discussing in this House.
I would also like to point out that the flexibility instrument was not introduced in Berlin in order to enable the Commission to redeploy funds in anticipation of the Budget being drawn up, but in order to facilitate up-to-date responses to current political challenges. Administrative expenditure is not a current political challenge; on the contrary, it is something that, as a matter of principle, has to be borne by the Budget.
Let me also address the issue of civil crisis management. We in the PPE-DE group have great reservations about the creation of any new piggy bank or flexibility instrument intended to be called on for finance in such problem areas. I have little sympathy for the way the Commission is pushing this idea, even though it is well known that the Council will not take it up under any circumstances. This is where we could have done with something more intelligent. We in the PPE-DE group have proposed something that I hope the majority in this House will support, namely that we should allocate Budget funds to this by means of the emergency reserve and also find a road down which the Council can go all the way.
Commissioner, I will conclude by saying one more thing. I am slowly getting sick of the way we have the same procedure every year for promoting town-twinning. Now you have again decreased the amount of funds allocated to that heading. The Council makes further cuts – we are used to that – and we end up having to top the funds up again. You know perfectly well what Parliament wants, so just put it into the Budget proposal. We should not have to carry on fighting each other like this."@en1
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