Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-29-Speech-3-183"
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"en.20061129.18.3-183"2
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".
Mr President, Mrs Lehtomäki, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, at the end of over a year and a half’s intensive parliamentary debate, we are about to adopt the Seventh Framework Programme and the specific programmes associated with it, and I am, today, grateful first of all, of course to our rapporteur Mr Buzek for his dedicated work, but also to all the other Members of this House who have made their own contributions to the framework programme and to the specific programmes.
As rapporteur on the specific programme ‘Ideas’, I am, of course, particularly pleased and honoured that the Seventh Framework Programme, or, specifically, the ‘Ideas’ programme, sees the long-awaited inauguration of the European Research Council.
Why do we need a European Research Council? The intention is that it should reinforce basic research in Europe, thus closing a substantial gap in European research funding, which has, up to now, concentrated mainly on applied research, even though almost all the innovative and groundbreaking developments have come about as a result of basic research; one needs think only of such everyday things as digital cameras or CD players, which would have been impossible without scientists such as Max Planck or Albert Einstein to lay the theoretical foundations.
The European Research Council, the ERC, needs to be a success if it is to attract leading researchers to Europe or to keep our own top European researchers here. If it is to do that, it must be able to do its work independently; this is something that we in this House have repeatedly emphasised, and the Commissioner has also endorsed the idea in his outline. What that means is that, in this European Research Council, it must be the researchers whose views count, the researchers who decide which basic research projects should get funding. It really is a new thing for politicians to say that they are going to keep out of the decisions as to what is worthy of support, and instead leave the decision-making to the research community, that is to say, to the researchers whom we vote onto the Council. I am also particularly proud that we have decided – or rather will, I hope, decide tomorrow – that the sole criterion for the spending of money by the European Research Council should be that of scientific excellence.
This House has insisted from the very outset that the European Research Council should not be a pocket version of the DG Research. I trust that the Commissioner will understand when I say that I have nothing against the Commission, but, if the Research Council really is to be something new, the people who decide what it does must not be politicians, or, indeed the highly-qualified officials in DG Research, but researchers – and, yes, I know I am repeating myself, but I do think this is important.
We in this House have had a hand in pointing the Council in the right direction, but, following an initial stage in which the Council is to be administered by the Commission, consideration is to be given to whether it is actually capable of operating on its own. Once that evaluation has been carried out, we will be able to come to a decision on the Council’s final structure. I am very grateful that we were assured, in the trilogue, that this House would have the power of codecision as to what the Council’s final structure should actually be like.
We also saw it as important that the Research Council, when it starts work on 1 January 2007, should not become a closed shop, in other words, that it should be open and transparent and work in an open and transparent way. Our House has brought in a number of amendments to that effect, including stipulations that members of its scientific board should be elected in accordance with a rotation system, and we have, of course, by capping the Research Council’s administrative budget, ensured that, at the end of the day, the money goes where it should go, that is, to the researchers, rather than being spent on admin. The Budget allocated to the European Research Council – amounting in any case to EUR 7.5 billion over seven years – ought, then, to be a good basis on which it can begin its work.
The Research Council has what is needed in order for it to become the model of European success that we need, a beacon for European research. We also need something that has nothing to do with the Research Council. Tomorrow we have to send out an appeal to the effect that Europe’s research community has to be one of the things whereby it identifies itself. Europe is a peaceful community; it is perceived as a community of values, a community founded upon the rule of law, with the European internal market as well as the economic and monetary union. There is only one thing that we lack, and Mr Busquin, with his European Research Area, really has opened up the right path. We must also become a European knowledge community, a European community of researchers. If the Research Council, the programmes, and that on which we are to vote tomorrow help to bring us closer to that, then we in this House will all have done a good piece of work."@en1
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