Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-13-Speech-2-148"
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"en.20030513.7.2-148"2
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"Mr President, firstly I would like to express my sincerest thanks to Mrs Neena Gill for her excellent estimate of the European Parliament’s revenue and expenditure for the year 2004.
It is difficult to make estimates because parliamentary elections are to be held during the year and the EU will enlarge. In general, with parliamentary elections half the Members change, and next time it will perhaps be more, as the old Member States will have 56 fewer seats. At the same time we will have 162 new Members from the new Member States. Both these factors will increase Parliament’s expenditure, and at the same time they cause uncertainty with respect to estimates.
The aim is to keep Parliament’s share of administrative expenditure below 20%. The target is an ambitious one because a further EUR 46 million is to be budgeted for the Statute of Members. This expenditure item is new. For that reason exceeding the ceiling by this amount may be justified because it would not actually alter the old way costs are distributed between the EU and the Member States, as the Member States have been responsible for salaries up till now.
The rapporteur is trying to improve services to Members in core activities, which is to say those duties that relate to legislation and the budget. The focus is the right one. Likewise, the rapporteur is calling for improved planning of meetings to avoid overlapping. This would cut costs, for example, through a simultaneous reduction in the number of interpreters needed, which would make interpreting arrangements for the new Member States easier in particular. At the same time that would allow Members to participate more in the work of all their committees. For that reason, the appropriateness of the constituency weeks must be assessed more precisely in the future.
In this connection, however, we have to view new benefits for Members with some reservations. For example, there will be no possibility of expanding transport services, not at least before we have some definitive experience of the other new areas of expenditure.
Extending the health insurance scheme to apply to former Members does not seem justified and my group is not in favour of this. Each Member State has been responsible for its previous Members’ social security matters when salaries have been paid. If Parliament applies the health insurance scheme to the current Members it is only reasonable, as they work outside their own countries and it counts as occupational health care. This argument does not apply to former Members, however, and it would be just another, somewhat covert, privilege.
Multilingualism will increase in Parliament, as the number of official languages will grow from 11 to 20. This means that the practice of using two separate interpreters to translate what someone is saying will increase. We should investigate whether we could impose special obligations to translate many languages directly into the ‘big’ languages, such as English, French and German, in which case most of the Members of Parliament would be able to listen to a speech that has been translated by just one interpreter."@en1
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