Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-02-Speech-2-030"
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"en.20030902.1.2-030"2
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"Mr President, I would first like to congratulate the rapporteurs, Mr Mastorakis and Mr Pomés Ruiz, for their excellent reports. Cohesion policy is a basic precondition for the existence and legitimacy of the EU as a whole. A mechanism is needed which will also boost prosperity in the most disadvantaged regions. Cohesion policy is founded on the Treaty on European Union. Both in the present Treaty and that being drafted by the European Convention regional and social cohesion is presented as a principle that runs through all policy areas.
When the new Member States join the European Union, they will all be in need of structural development. The danger is that regional and structural policy funding with regard to the old Member States will decrease. Then these least favoured regions in terms of their economy would be having to pay more for enlargement than the regions that are economically the strongest, which, on the other hand, will benefit most from it. For that reason, funding for the former eligible areas must not be reduced.
In Finland and Sweden in particular, there are sparsely populated, remote regions, the current Objective 1 areas, for which access to markets is difficult. That is why these regions should be considered very remote areas on a par with the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores.
A particular problem is the way the Structural Funds are currently administered, which is inefficient and bureaucratic. This is visible in the under utilisation of funds, which is catastrophic. In 2000, EUR 6.7 billion of appropriations remained unspent; in the following year the amount was EUR 8.7 billion, and in 2002 it was EUR 6.2 billion. Outstanding commitments now stand at more than EUR 90 billion, or almost the equivalent of the budget for three years. This jeopardises the credibility of this whole area of policy. Administration must be dramatically reformed and greatly simplified. The so-called n+2 rule, created to make administration more efficient, does not work, because the Commission accepts repeated advance payments as means of payment, even though the project itself should not even have been started. That is why this rule too should be revised."@en1
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