Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-22-Speech-2-108"
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"en.20021022.6.2-108"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I too would of course like to thank our two rapporteurs. Parliament has had what you might call a Swedish experience, and I think that it has been a good experience. It has been very much geared towards consensus and has been imaginative and flexible in equal measure, and has for once closely examined structural aspects. I am sure that this Budget procedure also has structural side effects that need to be very carefully examined.
From this perspective, I would also like to make the following comment: we have heard several times that this is the last Budget for just 15 Member States before enlargement. But I hope that it is also one of the last Budgets before the convention secures full budget rights for this House, in the medium term at least, in relation to all types of expenditure policy and income policy. That is a request that we have made. You know that I have repeated this request during every Budget procedure; it has become a familiar refrain. I think it is important that we should help to democratise the Budget procedure here.
The hallmark of the Budget as we draw it up at present is that heated debates rage during the budget-setting process around every million, sometimes even every thousand euros, yet during the year we often have to shift funds around and restructure the Budget. This year alone we will probably draw up six supplementary and amending budgets. We will have between 70 and 80 carry-overs, which means that a great many appropriations will have to be moved around. Not only this year, but also in previous years, both during the budget procedure and right at the end of the year we have had to resort to frontloading in order to finance things that strictly speaking fall in the following year. We also demonstrate by means of this pragmatic approach that we are prepared to finance essential aspects of European policy, and that although we set a Budget at the beginning of the year, there is so much flexibility and room for manoeuvre that at the end of the year the Budget is no longer as reliable as might have been wished and assumed at the outset, when we were discussing certain issues so forcefully. That means that this form of budget setting at the very least needs reflecting upon. We should take this into account in the coming weeks, months and years when we are further developing our budget policy.
As the Commissioner has said, the 2003 Budget is a thrifty one. We will be spending just 1.05% of GNP to tackle all the tasks facing the European Union.
If you look at the position of those countries that are net contributors, which are so often the subject of debate, you will find that the biggest net contributors pay no more than 0.3 to 0.7% of their GNP. That ranges from 0.3% for my own country and 0.7% of GNP, to finance this European policy. 0.3% for Germany!
So much for the heated debates that we are always having about how expensive this is all supposed to be! In the context of the Budget, we try to husband our resources carefully. We try to ensure that balances are maintained. That will be a job for the future – starting with balances in this continent. We need a financially balanced Europe in the long term. We need to make sure that our institutions are capable of functioning, not forgetting the prospect of enlargement, and also bearing in mind the maturing process that our institutions and the European Union as a whole are going through. These are long-term tasks.
We need to ensure that people in Europe who place their trust in us can rely on financial balance and are not taken unawares by short-term changes. I would like to make this point very specifically in the case of agriculture, but it also applies to regional policy. We are also interested in seeing reform of our regional policy and in unblocking the backlog of appropriations still to be executed. I would, however, like to say this, Commissioner: it is not enough for Commissioner Barnier to examine how Structural Fund bureaucracy can be dismantled. That is something that applies to all the EU support programmes. I would be pleased if the other Commissioners affected were to behave in the same way.
We therefore need to strike a balance in our continent. But we as Europeans also need a balance between continents, because we are not just a fortunate island; we also have to think about relations between the continents. In the past we have repeatedly used our external policy to help other regions of the world. This has become ever more difficult, because new tasks have been added to the ones we originally embarked upon: financing, reconstruction, the Balkans, financing reconstruction in Afghanistan, and also the enormous task of improving world health, not least the battle against AIDS. That is not just an issue in Africa, it affects the whole world and that includes our own continent. Money needs to be earmarked for that.
There is a lot we could say about financing, Mrs Schreyer, but there is no denying that we have a responsibility here that we need to shoulder. It is hard to do all this. Category 4 has caused us major headaches this year, just as in previous years. We have to be flexible if we want to solve all the world's problems. But there is one thing we need to be clear about: Europe's citizens can rest assured that we will protect their interests in this continent. However, we are also keen to ensure that our continent occupies an appropriate position in the world as a whole. We intend to set budgets in conjunction with you in a thrifty and sound way but at the same time with an eye to the future."@en1
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