Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-17-Speech-3-032"
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"en.20060517.3.3-032"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, it has to be said, with all due respect, that there is such a thing as the European Parliament and that decisions on Europe’s finances are not left to the Council alone.
I believe that the reason why this House, through the negotiating process, achieved important improvements simply because, from the word go, we did not work on the basis of ‘Here’s the money, now work out how to manage on it’, but instead paid attention to the structures. We took care that we did not, as we had done in the past, fight to put plenty of money in the Budget lines – as we had done with the last, 700 billion, perspective – only to end up with the actual expenditure totalling just over 550 billion; what matters, then, is the quality of the expenditure, and that is why we insisted on making headway on the Budget Regulation front, making things less bureaucratic, less tangled. The money must actually be able to flow, and we must be sure that it gets to the right people; that is why it was vital that we should ensure that the Member States, too, paid attention to the quality of each item of expenditure and considered whether it was getting to the right people.
We attached, then, great importance to the quality of the expenditure, and that also means that we want to prevent margins needed elsewhere from being eaten up by the constant creation of new agencies or extensions of the Common Foreign and Security Policy; that is why we had to set boundaries. We have therefore made sure that budgeting will be done in a more structured way in future and that the money can actually be made use of.
Secondly, we have made sure of sufficient flexibility in the Budget for new things. Where the Council, regrettably, had left nothing over in the ‘Citizens’ Europe’, we have created a margin, in order that not everything should be used up in the multiannual programme, with no chance of doing anything more. We have improved and extended the pilot projects and the preparatory measures, thereby giving this House greater scope for influence, and we have added 5% for the sake of greater flexibility to the budgets of the multiannual programmes, enabling us to respond to challenges with greater flexibility and precision.
We have also managed to achieve things of importance in the individual subject areas, such as lifelong learning, about which everyone always has great things to say, and where you, Mr President-in-Office, seem to believe that there are only 140 000 students left, whereas we have increased their number to 210 000. We have also achieved increases in the trans-European networks and in PROGRESS, the programme that, by combating social exclusion, sends a message to Europe that we are not merely an economic union, but also spare a thought for, and help, those who have problems to contend with. We have also managed to get more money for Health and Consumer Protection, for cross-frontier cooperation and in many other areas.
If you were to ask me whether I would like to see more than what we have achieved, I would tell you, without a doubt, that, yes, I would have liked more, but that I know that there are always two, or sometimes three, sides to a compromise, and that is why we were as tough as possible in negotiating, for we were negotiating with people who drive a hard bargain. The result that emerged is one with which not everyone can be satisfied, and all the things we would have liked, which we described in the Böge report, will be back on the table in the next few years, and these requests will keep coming back to you, whether for own resources for funding agricultural policy or for other areas; we will be asking you how you propose to meet your commitments – by which I mean to GALILEO – and you will then come to us.
Let me say in conclusion that this compromise may well not be the stuff of my dreams, but I wholeheartedly endorse it, and ask my fellow Members of this House to approve it."@en1
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