Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-03-14-Speech-2-387"
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"en.20060314.30.2-387"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner Grybauskaitė, ladies and gentlemen, today I am tabling 135 amendments to the Financial Regulation in this House. I was delighted at the Commissioner’s announcement today that she intends to incorporate some of the quite fundamental points of this report in the Commission’s revision.
I should like to thank you all once more for your cooperation, and I hope to be able to count on your support tomorrow.
Parliament is using this initial rolling revision of the text – a text so important to the administration – as a means to eliminate fundamental problems. We have heard some very fundamental, harsh criticism of the bureaucratic procedures. Numerous organisations applying for grants, companies participating in supply and service tenders, and indeed those in the Commission and other institutions who apply the Financial Regulation, have contributed to our reform and to Parliament’s amendments. I am very much obliged to you all. Your professional advice will enable the improvement of the procedures.
Those in this House to whom I am particularly obliged include President Borrell and of course my colleagues in the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Budgetary Control, primarily Mr Pahor and everyone who has worked on the proposals in the intergroup over a period of months. It was not only thanks to the constructive cooperation, but also to the general sense of the pressure to reform, that the two committees adopted the report either by a vast majority or unanimously. My personal assistant, Mr Sichel, has accomplished a great deal in this regard; I should also like to thank him most sincerely for this. In addition, those in the Commission to whom I am obliged include Commissioner Grybauskaitė, Director-General Mr Romero, and Mr Taverne and his staff for the numerous fruitful discussions, which I sincerely hope will continue, and really look forward to.
Everyone – including myself, with my years of experience of dealing with the Financial Regulation – is wondering what kind of Europe this is that requires such complicated, costly application procedures. Up to one third of the amount of each grant is lost on the cost of the application procedure. Year after year, organisations throw away substantial sums on participation in European policy tenders, even though they have no prospect of success. Forty pages of forms and an additional 500 pages of manuals is not the exception but the rule. Only 5–25% of applications are successful. At costs of up to EUR 200 000 per application, you can imagine the money that is being squandered in Europe every time an organisation participates in an EU tender.
What kind of Europe is it in which companies no longer wish to participate in tenders because they have to submit two annual balance sheets, even for routine applications? Indeed, the Commission has already worked very intensively on this, and it will continue to work on it and to make changes to the important implementing rules. I should also like to encourage Commissioner Grybauskaitė in this, and would be most obliged to her if she were to take up all of Parliament’s proposals, as we do not want the Commission to be equated throughout Europe with ponderousness, red tape and money-wasting; we want it to be seen as a service provider for all those wishing to implement and support European policies.
Our most important amendments will be put to a roll-call vote tomorrow. As Commissioner Grybauskaitė has already announced, some are to be incorporated. I should also like to present a few more. One concerns a database for the notification of applicants, avoiding the submission of multiple copies of documents and thus saving time and money at the application stage. We should also like to see Commission decisions rather than voluminous contracts. This could make procedures less protracted and – particularly in the case of small grants – less burdensome.
Our main point is that, in future, the Commission should assist applicants with the procedures. This is a cultural revolution, but it will be beneficial all round, particularly to the reputation of the EU. Our objectives are improvements in predictability, reliability and legal certainty, and, for the purposes of improving flexibility, an amendment has been tabled regarding the limited transferability of commitments, which would otherwise lapse. I shall be tabling another oral amendment tomorrow, which, whilst refraining from specifying an amount, nevertheless refers to a maximum sum. The negotiations on this will depend on the Financial Perspective.
I would appeal to the Council not to leave the situation as it stands. What kind of procedures are they that block outflows of funds whilst Member State organisations are losing so much money? This Parliament has recognised that we cannot go on as we are doing, especially as the complex bureaucratic procedures are not even particularly successful at achieving the objective of protecting Community funds.
That is the reason for my final request: let us strive for a new version of the Financial Regulation in the medium term. In the Member States, financial regulations are simple documents for administrations, because they have to be used daily. The EU’s Financial Regulation must not count as the most complicated the administration could have conceived for its self-management. This item, too, remains on Parliament’s agenda."@en1
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