Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-148"
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"en.20020924.10.2-148"2
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"Mr President, like the draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Budgets, Mr Wynn, I am most grateful for this new debate. We floated the idea as early as last spring, when we were extremely uncertain as to whether our efforts would come to anything. For us, it has been the overarching objective to try to reform the European Parliament’s budgetary work, especially with a view to next year’s completely new method of ‘Activity Based Budgeting’. In this context, it has been important also to be able to renew the debate itself, which is perhaps the most visible part of Parliament’s budgetary work.
This reform also means that we have endeavoured to increase the committees’ participation in the work. I have been round practically all the committees and discussed budget issues with them, and we are now also encouraging the committees to take an active part in today’s debate. By using working parties and different types of report to focus more sharply upon the degree of implementation and upon the major budgetary deficiencies we have in the area of implementation, we shall now tighten up our demands for Parliament’s budgetary decisions actually to be put into practice.
Against this background, I welcome the way in which the Commission, the Council, a majority of Commissioners and the Danish Finance Minister in his Presidency role have taken part in the debate, and I hope that Parliament’s own representatives will also make substantial efforts to ensure that we obtain a more exciting and constructive debate than has been provided by the fairly predictable monologues delivered up until now.
The EU’s budgetary system suffers from serious defects, especially a lack of flexibility. I believe that both Parliament and, certainly, the public have difficulty understanding why it is completely impossible to find resources for the proactive part of agricultural policy known as rural development, while billions are allocated to the other dimension of agricultural policy. Knowing, as we did, that there were resources elsewhere that were not being used, it has also been difficult for us to refuse the administrative expenditure needed for enlargement and to try to find a way of funding this expenditure without making use of the flexibility instrument. Consequently, one of this year’s innovations is that we have tried more systematically to find and make use of unemployed resources and have contrived more systematically to bring expenditure forward in order to ease the pressure on a heavily burdened category over the next few years, something which might, for example, make it easier to meet the needs that exist prior to enlargement.
That is a temporary solution. I really think we need a much more extensive budgetary reform. I also think we should address this issue in the Convention. The incredibly inflexible budget ceilings we live with at present should not be turned into permanent fixtures. They should definitely not be enshrined in the Treaty, and Parliament should self-evidently have the same right of co-decision in agricultural policy as we have in other areas.
I should also like to thank the Danish Presidency for its extremely sober and constructive approach so far. We reached some sound agreements in July, and we had a stimulating three-way meeting yesterday about how we might solve the problem of the floods.
I should like to round off this introduction by appealing for the same constructive approach when it comes to solving the major outstanding problems, above all in category 4, concerned with external expenditure. We need much more flexibility. Parliament will protest at the fact that, without new resources being supplied, we are constantly adding new expenditure in relation, for example, to Afghanistan and the Global AIDS and Health Fund, over and above the contributions we have already made in relation to the Balkans, Kosovo, Serbia etc. That, I believe, will be one of the main points in Parliament’s criticism of both the Commission’s and the Council’s handling of the budget."@en1
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