Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-13-Speech-1-027"
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"en.20060313.15.1-027"2
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".
Mr President, further to the proposed order of business, I have a request concerning Wednesday. With the order of business as proposed, as I see it, when we come to the statement by the Council and the Commission on the preparation of the European Council and on the Lisbon Strategy, we find ourselves – much as we do with the debates between 3 o’clock and 7 o’clock on the Council statement on the informal meeting of foreign ministers, on the Brok Report, and on other reports – reaching the outer limit of what is feasible in terms of organisation. I propose to elucidate that by reference to some figures on speaking times.
The speaking times for the Council statement on the summit and for both the Council’s and Commission’s statement and the ensuing debate, are shared out as follows: the Council gets 30 minutes speaking time, the Commission get 20 minutes, and the House as a whole gets 60. What that means is that the two other institutions have about as much time in which to speak as all the Members and all the Groups put together. The result is that, in a debate on this subject, the Group of the European People’s Party has 18 minutes at its disposal, my own group has 14, the Liberals have 7, and the Greens have four-and-a-half. I have just told my group that this is going to spark off squabbles within the groups, since, if I were to get all my experts to speak, I would need more speaking time than has been made available to us. The consequence of that is that groups will be reducing their speaking times to such an extent that people will end up speaking for no more than a minute each. While that may help keep the peace within the groups, it will do nothing whatever for the quality of debate in this House. It is because this does not make sense that we will continue to urge you to move further towards the reform that you have set in motion. The simple fact is that we need more time for such debates.
What we also need, though, is for the institutions, under the circumstances under which we have to work, to reduce their speaking times somewhat, and this we ask them to do. I am pretty sure that the Council and the Commission are well able to get the key points that they want to make across to us in less than 30 or 20 minutes, for the fact is that I have to get mine across in five, and I have not so far had the impression of having succeeded in this. If I were to have 20 minutes in which to speak, it would be quite splendid – not only for me, but also for this House!
For now, though, I ask you and the services to get together with the two institutions by Wednesday – that is to say, with whichever of the President-in-Office of the Council and the President of the Commission is actually present – and reduce your speaking time so as to make more time available in which this House can have a debate. Let me just read you the figures for the afternoon. That afternoon, the time available for speaking to the reports amounts to 50 minutes each for the Council and the Commission, while Mr Brok, the rapporteur, gets five – which is quite utterly inadequate in view of the importance of his report – and all the Members put together get 90 minutes between them. I put it to you, Mr President, that that is not reasonable. I therefore ask that, in the first instance, you agree with the institutions on a reduction for Wednesday, and then, in the longer term, I ask that this House should organise our orders of business in such a way that we have a proper amount of time in which to debate important matters among ourselves."@en1
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