Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-05-Speech-2-167"
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"en.20060905.22.2-167"2
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".
Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, having heard the presentation of the 2007 draft budget, we have an opportunity this afternoon to continue the discussions we had in Helsinki in July. Thank you for that invitation, Madam President-in-Office, which enabled us to establish contact as a small group, which then became a bigger one for the first reading of the draft budget in Brussels in July.
In conclusion I would like to thank the President-in-Office for having come today to present the draft budget. There are a lot of discussions ahead of us, but we will seek a successful outcome for this budget that takes into account the European Parliament’s priorities, as well as those of the Council.
As the budget rapporteur for the House, I should like to make four comments on this particular occasion: one general comment and three specific comments.
The first, general, comment is that since this is the first year in the financial perspective we need to think of it in terms of being a strategic base, because in this particular year we will be setting in motion a number of ideas or ways of doing things that will reverberate over the next few years up to 2013. As stated in particular in Parliament’s resolution on the Annual Policy Strategy adopted earlier this year, we need in Europe as a whole to be able to adapt more quickly to the phenomenon of globalisation, which is changing the global economy and changing the orientation of our priorities to one of ‘policy for results’ – as the President of the Commission has explained. I sense this is going to change the way in which we budget and finance what we do, and we may see the first signs of this in the 2007 budget.
Specifically, I would like to address the question of value for money, because this marks a departure from the norm, as I understand it from the Council’s first reading, with many of the decisions on cut-backs in various areas not being done across-the-board but by taking into account the results of the activity statements produced by the Commission in particular sectors. As we shape our thinking on this we will refer back to what was set out with regard to the Annual Policy Strategy, which was that there are other elements that must be taken into account when looking at the absorption capacity of particular lines or the funds available for them.
The first of these elements is the document produced by the Commission, the budget forecast alert, which shows how expenditure is being implemented across particular budget lines for a particular year. Another of the cost-benefit analyses we have launched in the Committee on Budgets is to look at particular areas where we think expenditure could be weak in quantitative or, in particular, qualitative terms.
Last but not least there are the Court of Auditors’ reports, of which we have many, on the way in which expenditure is used in particular budget areas. We are beginning to sense in the Committee on Budgets that we can bring together various elements that will indicate to us those lines where expenditure will be implemented correctly, and of which we can be sure, and perhaps also other lines of which we cannot be so sure. We certainly hope that by the end of the process, Madam President-in-Office, you will be able to align the Council with the declaration we adopted in July, at the time of the draft budget, calling for value for money to be considered in the European Union budget.
The second specific issue is the question of priorities. We are all aware that we have less money available under the financial perspective than we had sought in the final negotiations earlier this year, and that it therefore behoves us to look at the priorities across the different sectors. When it comes to the vote at first reading I suspect that Parliament will be following the priorities set out by Mr Böge, its rapporteur on the financial perspective. These have not changed greatly and are also set out in the resolution on the Annual Policy Strategy. That is what we are expecting for areas of research and innovation, into which we understand that the Council, in the form of the Member States, would like to invest more money, but of course there is never quite that much when it comes to the final budget.
Then there is the implementation of pilot projects and preparatory actions. In this field too we can think of areas in which we can spur action and in which long-term programmes could be run, in the form, perhaps, of exchanges of business and scientific personnel between the EU and China, or the EU and India. However, you cannot expect us at this stage to pick up on the ideas regarding administration. We rejected those when we discussed them at first reading in the Council, and it will take a great deal more discussion before we can come to any agreement on what to do as regards staff resources for the Commission.
The last point is that it is very strange that often in this House we can vote on a legislative programme, as we did on the one for 2006 last December, and yet no citizen in the European Union knows what the European Union will be legislating on, because you have the Commission proposal and you then have the parliamentary resolution. In the Committee on Budgets, as stated with regard to the annual policy strategy, we are looking to bring those two processes together and to have the budget decision and the legislative decision in December, followed by a clear statement from the Commission as to what the legislative programme for the Union is, so that everyone would know what it was – not just us in this House but people all over Europe."@en1
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