Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-01-13-Speech-4-057"
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"en.20050113.5.4-057"2
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"Mr President, honourable Members, I have been listening carefully to what you have been saying and I shall comment briefly on the four things you mentioned.
First of all, there are a few reasons why we cannot rehire the teachers, the first of which is financial: such hiring would be incompatible with the Financial Regulation in two aspects, the first of which is procurement and the second is the principle of sound financial management.
The second reason is legal. If the teachers were rehired, language courses would continue to be delivered by internal teachers and teachers employed at the language schools. This coexistence has always constituted a legal risk. The difference in salary and other conditions was significant. In this respect, there is a risk that such a difference of treatment between employees who essentially carried out the same duties would be considered by the Belgian courts as an illegal contractual construction.
The third reason concerns assessing whether rehiring the teachers would mean having to negotiate new conditions. Experience shows that internal teachers were not particularly flexible vis-à-vis the Commission, despite the advantageous conditions it offered.
Secondly, there was the question about procurement restrictions. This was not a restrictive procedure. The Financial Regulation obliges the Commission to issue an open call for tenders where the four-year amount is in excess of around EUR 155 000. In fact, the call for candidates was opened and published in the Official Journal. The selection procedure was conducted on the basis of financial and technical criteria. The successful candidates were then allowed to compete and, finally, contractors for different lots were then chosen on the basis of cost and quantity.
I will very briefly address the issue of total savings. They were calculated in terms of the difference between what it would cost to maintain the teachers' contracts and the cost of severance payments. The savings were calculated on the basis of the costs for 2003. The total savings also took into account the total cost of the language-training programme, each teacher being replaced at retirement age by a contractor employee, and the total cost of the same language-training programme executed exclusively by contractors as from September 2004. Finally, account was taken of the sum of annual savings over the 2004-2031 period, when the fewest teachers would, theoretically, retire. At the beginning there would be many such teachers, but the number would decrease towards the end of that period. The final calculation under this scheme showed that the savings would come to EUR 23.8 million.
A remark was made about the exaggerated figure. On the contrary, the EUR 23.8 million – cited in the documents prepared for the Commission decision – to which I referred corresponds to the cost of continuing teachers' contracts, and that was reduced to EUR 20 million. The decision was taken on that basis.
The real amount also depends on individual decisions by teachers to take early retirement or to leave on personal grounds of invalidity and sickness, and, lastly, on the salary and contract cost evaluation. In this context we wanted to err on the side of caution.
The final point raised concerns the British Council and its work. According to information provided by the contractors, I can assure you that no previous or present Commissioner is a member of the management board of any of the previous or current contractors. In 2004 the British Council tendered for English courses, but the contracts were awarded to CLL and Lerian Communications."@en1
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