Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-14-Speech-2-201"
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"en.20041214.13.2-201"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, I am speaking today in my capacity as my group’s coordinator in the Committee on Regional Development, which has the second largest individual budget to deal with, as the budget for cohesion and structural policy, with a 35% share, is second only in size to the budget for agriculture. Alongside the tasks we have to perform in dealing with the Financial Perspective, the specialist committees and most especially the Committee on Regional Development have the task of preparing the relevant Regulations for each Fund for the new financial period of 2007 to 2013. I see the anchoring of this cohesion and structural policy, including in our Constitution, on the basis of the Lisbon and Copenhagen conclusions, as creating very modern political approaches to the implementation of a European policy for the public’s benefit.
What we in the Committee on Regional Development need for our work is a reliable statement and foundation, and both I and my group believe that only the Prodi proposal can fulfil that role. I will permit myself the aside that I get the impression that regional policy appears to be used by everyone as a sort of piggy bank. The Council does it by attempting to get a percentage accepted while a majority of its members want to make cuts because agriculture has already ground to a halt. Having seen the way you, Commissioner, deal with the Committee on Budgets and the temporary committee on the political challenges and Budget resources for the enlarged EU between 2007 and 2013, I can say that the Commission does too, calling ever more frequently for a Financial Perspective. I get the impression that the second half of that sentence is missing: ‘whether that Perspective be good or bad’. That is something we cannot afford.
The attempt is made ever more frequently to use structural policy measures to fund other things; the example I would give is the way in which the funding of Natura 2000 is being removed from the environmental sector and moved to structural policy. Let me also say, though, that regional policy was necessary in the old EU of 15 Member States, and it is necessary in the new one, with its 25. We need efficiency, but we cannot afford it to happen that drastic cuts in this area punish a large part of the population for something that we all wanted and that the European Union always has made tangible and accessible to millions of citizens.
Commissioner, you said that the newspapers report only failures. In Germany, we have a saying to the effect that there is no smoke without fire. That is why debates about 1.05% or 1.06% are not helpful. Let me remind you that the European Union has always worked well when the Commission has strengthened Parliament and vice versa. We can negotiate well together, whether the Council is on the same side or our opponent."@en1
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