Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-04-Speech-2-031"
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"en.20060704.5.2-031"2
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".
Mr President, I would like to start by thanking you for your continuous support and encouragement and for the role the European Parliament has played in preparing a reform of cohesion policy.
As requested by Parliament, the Commission has prepared a joint declaration in which the Commission commits itself to presenting an assessment of the budgetary execution of the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund for the 2007-2013 programming period, including the consequences of the implementation of the decommitment rule.
Our major concern in the months to come is to ensure that the new, good-quality cohesion programmes will start on time. Much remains to be done. We are working with the Finnish Presidency to ensure that the Community strategy guidelines on cohesion can be adopted by the Council after the European Parliament has delivered its opinion. I understand that we can achieve that at the end of September or early October. The Member States will then formally present their national strategies concerning how they propose to use cohesion policy, after which we will discuss in detail the operational programmes, with final adoption by the Commission.
In order to save time the Commission has already entered into informal discussions. We have already received the draft national programmes from 21 Member States.
We are gradually completing the preparation of the new 2007-2013 generation, but we have to think long-term to ensure that cohesion policy will continue to support convergence and the economic and social modernisation of Europe. The Fourth Cohesion Report – due for publication in spring next year – and the Cohesion Forum to be held at that time will be important steps and will flesh out the ideas for the future.
I look forward to your debate, convinced that your decision today will allow us successfully to finalise preparations for the new generation of our common cohesion policy.
First of all, let me say how much we appreciate your role in securing a significant financial envelope. Secondly, we appreciate your contribution to setting up a new architecture and also new instruments for this policy. You have insisted on establishing a more ambitious territorial cooperation objective. That objective has a considerable and clear European added value, in particular in the context of the enlargement of the European Union. I am sure that the increase of 4% in the financial resources available for this objective of reinforcing transnational and interregional cooperation, which had suffered the most substantial reductions in the European Council decision of December 2005, will help us to be more efficient and more effective in bringing European regions across the continent together.
In addition, I would like to thank you for your support for developing a unique instrument designed to overcome the problems encountered by Member States, regions and local authorities in undertaking cross-border, transnational or interregional cooperation actions, whether funded by structural funds or not. For the first time ever, the EU will provide an adequate legal framework for enhanced cross-border, interregional and transnational cooperation.
Thirdly, I appreciate your role in ensuring that cohesion policy will apply to all regions and Member States and that it will contribute to more and better jobs and faster economic growth. In this context, I am also very happy that you welcomed our efforts to create new supporting instruments such as ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Jessica’, which will bring in new partners and expertise from European financial institutions. That will address genuine market values and make the structural Funds work much harder.
Let me use this opportunity to express my personal thanks to the rapporteurs, Mr Hatzidakis, Mr Andria, Mr Silva Peneda, Mr Fava and Mr Olbrycht, and to say how much we appreciated the role Mrs Krehl played as rapporteur for the Financial Perspective and her work on the Community Strategic Guidelines. Let me also thank Mr Beaupuy, without whose commitment the urban dimension would probably not be so prominent in our new policy.
It was a pleasure to work with Mr Galeote, Chairman of the Committee on Regional Development, whom I thank very much for his commitment. He always maintained a very constructive and cooperative spirit and we shared the same principles and priorities throughout the negotiations.
Jointly we have managed to avoid a policy based on a system of double standards in the application of the rules on the eligibility of non-recoverable VAT and in the application of the principle of total eligible cost as the basis of co-financing.
We will not have two distinct cohesion policies for Europe, one for the old and one for the new Member States. That would have been, I believe, at odds with our efforts to produce an efficient and coherent policy, with transparency, with sound financial management and with simplified regulations.
You have shared our insistence on the need to strengthen the partnership principle. We have jointly reinforced the role of NGOs, local and civil society and the environmental partners in our policy. With your support we have also strengthened the provisions on non-discrimination and sustainable development. However, there are a number of items where we failed fully to convince our Member States of their added value. I am thinking here of the concept of a Community reserve, of our intention to render the urban dimension of our policy mandatory and of Parliament’s idea of recycling the potentially unspent resources allocated to cohesion policy."@en1
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