Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-21-Speech-2-121"
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"en.20031021.5.2-121"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, around this time next year, the European Parliament, having been elected by the people of twenty-five European states, will discuss the first budget of the enlarged Union. The debate will be conducted in twenty languages. Parliament will then have 732 Members, and it will be the last budget to be prepared by the Prodi Commission, which will by then comprise 30 members. The discussion of the 2005 budget could coincide with the debates on the financial programming for the period after 2006. At the same time, the Member States will probably be ratifying the new Constitutional Treaty in accordance with their respective internal procedures.
As was the case last year, the Commission will inform Parliament in writing, in the first half of November, of its assessment of the feasibility of your proposed measures, especially the new pilot projects and preparatory measures. I shall ensure that due consideration is given in this assessment to the importance that your House attaches to these activities.
There is another important respect in which conditions are set fair for the budget of the European Union, namely the fact that the budgetary authority is due to take a joint decision in November on the adjustment of the various support programmes, the so-called internal policies, in preparation for enlargement. There are, of course, very many important programmes – the Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, the YOUTH programme and the Financial Instrument for the Environment (LIFE), to name but a few.
May I express my gratitude to Mr Böge and Mr Colom i Naval for their efforts to coordinate the work of all the specialised committees, and I am naturally delighted that we agree with so many of their proposals. This close cooperation is another reason why I can truly say that it has been a great pleasure to work with you on the preparation of the budget for the enlarged Union.
With regard to foreign aid, we face a new challenge in the 2004 budget in that it is our duty and our desire to make European aid available to the people of Iraq. We have spent EUR 100 million on humanitarian aid this year. Now it is a matter of playing our part in the reconstruction effort. We have addressed this point in our committees and in the trilogue framework, and it has also been discussed by the General Affairs Council. The Commission is proposing a further injection of EUR 200 million between now and the end of next year, over and above our humanitarian aid. But this aid cannot actually be disbursed unless the security situation improves, and the umbrella of the United Nations must be available for the implementation of projects.
There are still various different opinions in this House on the appropriate amount of aid for Iraq. The Commission’s proposal has been carefully weighed up, and I should like to remind you that you are due to vote on this matter on Thursday, the day before the donors’ conference in Madrid. For this reason, I urge you, on behalf of the Commission and particularly on behalf of my fellow-Commissioner Mr Patten, to give the Commission a clear mandate by signalling that the European Union speaks with one voice on this issue.
Let me close with a few figures on the volume of next year’s general budget. The Commission had proposed expenditure of EUR 100.6 billion, the Council has proposed EUR 100.1 billion, and you, in Parliament, will probably propose a volume of EUR 103.5 billion. The European expenditure-to-GDP ratio in this domain would therefore lie somewhere between 0.09% and 1.01%. There has never been so little divergence between our proposals in recent years, and I am certain that we shall iron out these small differences in the course of the budgetary procedure.
The draft general budget before you today reflects the enormity of this challenge. The budget has been drawn up for a fifteen-member EU for the first four months of 2004 and for an EU with twenty-five members from 1 May onwards. Moreover, it is presented in a new form, based on the principle of activity-based budgeting, which enables us to discern the precise cost of the various Community policies. Under the present parliamentary proposal, the budget for 2004 would allow for financial commitments amounting to EUR 112.3 billion, as against the figure of EUR 111.9 billion set by the Council and the EUR 112.2 billion proposed by the Commission. So we are not actually dealing with very wide divergences. Of the aforementioned amounts, a sum of EUR 12 billion is to be earmarked for the ten new Member States.
Of the commitment appropriations made in the 2004 budget, 79% cover the domains of agricultural policy, including support for rural areas, and of the Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund. This represents a 13% increase on this year’s allocation to these subsections. Since the allocation to the Structural Funds is laid down in the financial programming for the 15-member EU and in the Accession Treaty for the new Member States, there are no differences between the Council, Parliament and the Commission with regard to the Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund.
In the domain of support for rural areas, however, you will be voting on Thursday to determine whether you propose that the amount laid down in the financial programming should be exceeded. I agree with the rapporteur that the Interinstitutional Agreement should be preserved. As far as agricultural expenditure is concerned, the Commission will present its customary amending letter at the end of the month to take account of the latest market trends. I do not intend to anticipate the content of that letter, since it still has to be confirmed by the Commission, but I can indicate that most of the proposals made by the rapporteur, Mr Mulder, which have been the subject of intensive discussion, will be adopted, particularly the proposals that additional funds be allocated to finance a study examining whether and how farmers throughout Europe could be at least partly insured against losses arising from epizootic diseases and that funds be earmarked for the production of environmental indicators, which are playing an increasingly important role, as you know, in the context of the agricultural reform process, and for examination of the possibility of introducing a European quality label.
Scope is provided for more intensive research into marker vaccines against epizootic diseases within the resources allocated in the preliminary draft budget. Mr Mulder, you have convinced the Commission of the soundness of your proposals. I am confident that you will succeed in convincing the Council too. I should certainly like to add my own plea to the Council not to reject these proposals out of hand simply because they relate to compulsory expenditure. There would be no substantive justification for such rejection, nor would it be consistent with the prevailing spirit of constructive cooperation.
On behalf of the Commission, I can certainly welcome wholeheartedly the restoration by Parliament of the 272 new posts requested by the Commission for enlargement-related tasks, which the Council had deleted from the establishment plan. On this point may I address a special word of thanks not only to the rapporteur but also to Mrs Gill and to the chairman of the Committee on Budgets. You will initially enter these posts in the reserve, which I, naturally, see as less than ideal, but I can assure you that I shall do everything in my power to meet the prescribed requirements so that the funding for these posts can be released at the second reading.
With regard to the administrative appropriations in the budget, I should like to deal with two more points. The first of these concerns contributions to European political parties, to which Mrs Gill has just referred. This expenditure will be included in the EU budget for the first time, now that the legal basis for its inclusion has, I am glad to say, finally been adopted. I believe that a good and transparent arrangement has been devised, but I am naturally critical of the statement that this expenditure is to be financed outside Parliament’s 20% share of the appropriation for administrative expenditure. The Commission, needless to say, will be willing to negotiate in order to find a solution that is acceptable to all parties.
My second point concerns the new Financial Regulation. This successful product of our joint reforming activity entails many changes. These changes are reflected in the new division of the budget into policy areas, and associated with this is another new rule, whereby financial assistance in the form of grants from the EU budget to institutions, such as the Institute in Florence, to name but one, requires a legal basis. This means that it is no longer enough for these amounts to be entered in the budget; instead, there must be a legal basis for the authorisation of such grants, and they are also subject to the new conditions laid down in the Financial Regulation, which lays special emphasis on the need for transparent decision-making.
Parliament has made painstaking efforts to discuss the Commission’s proposals on the budget headings under chapter A-30, which have been on the table since May. In the case of the Council, however, progress has been anything but satisfactory, and I wish to take this opportunity to appeal once again to the Council to make every effort to ensure that, at the next trilogue session, we are able to foresee when the relevant legislation can be adopted. I ask the Council to approach the implementation of the Financial Regulation with the same enthusiasm that it invested in its reformulation."@en1
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