Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-29-Speech-3-189"
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".
Mr President, I wish to begin by congratulating the rapporteurs and my colleague in Committee on Budgets, Mrs Xenogiannakopoulou, for her thorough and insightful opinion.
In view of this badly needed simplification of access to funding, I support the proposals of the Committee on Budgets to create a database for the submission of applications and encourage the Commission to apply the principle of proportionality as regards the documents it requires. However, I would also urge the Commission to pay attention to the way the programme is controlled. Control mechanisms need to be coordinated and, as I have said, we must avoid unnecessary duplication and ensure that the overall cost of control is proportional to the benefit that it brings.
In conclusion, let me remind the Commission and the Council that this programme is supposed to be for the benefit of the citizens and to promote scientific excellence across the European Union. I do not think that, in view of this, we should try and make all the applicants jump through hoops to participate. On the contrary, we should rapidly award funding to those in Europe who show real innovation and initiative and help them to discover new funding opportunities to increase our competitive advantage vis-à-vis the other areas of the world. As I and all my colleagues have said, everyone recognises the vital role that research and development play in helping the European Union face the challenges presented by the rapidly developing economies of China and India. For this reason, I would strongly urge the Commission to put every euro this programme has been granted to the most effective use possible and ensure that there is a one hundred per cent implementation rate.
Finally, I would also call on our leaders in the Council to look beyond the EU borders and compare ourselves with other areas in the rest of the world and try and revisit this policy to increase resources sooner rather than later.
I wish to express my unreserved support for the collaborative research and development programmes in Europe. I see this as a very important policy area that has direct impact on the way the EU develops as a global economy and the way we are regarded by the rest of the world.
The Seventh Framework Programme, as we have heard, is the biggest EU research programme to date and it pulls all the research-related EU initiatives under the roof of its EUR 53 billion programme. The Commission’s initial request was for EUR 70 billion, which was a huge increase on previous years. However, we should not forget that this is a seven-year programme, not a five-year one like its immediate predecessor, and that its resources will be stretched across 27 Member States rather than the 15 and then 25 of the previous programmes. We should also understand that doubling the FP7 reflects the clear importance of science and research to the development of the EU as a global player and as an economic power.
If we want to be competitive, we must walk our talk by investing in the areas that we know are key to our growth. Unfortunately, I do not think the Council actually believes this and it is a pity that it did not support the Commission’s request for EUR 70 billion. Despite all the hype we have heard from the Council and all the noises it has made about the need to achieve the Lisbon goals and the importance of pushing our research and development spending up to 3% of GDP – which is still a long way behind Japan and the US – is it not incredible that the final figure agreed by the Council takes the spending up to only 1.5%? What is more astonishing is that the Luxembourg Presidency’s original proposal was to
research and development even more significantly. Thankfully, this option was rejected by many states, including my own, which saw the clear link between research and development and the growth and competitiveness of the EU. This policy area was revisited by the UK Presidency, which put forward proposals for increasing spending. I very much welcome the increase, but I lament, as I said earlier, that it is nowhere near the amount requested by the Commission and Parliament.
The launch of this programme presents us with a real opportunity to learn from and correct past mistakes. One area upon which we need to focus our efforts is that of reducing the duration of funding procedures. The present procedure is ridiculously long. It is not just organisations in my region in the West Midlands which have witnessed this: the European Court of Auditors reported delays of between eight and nine months. This is unacceptably long and it has to be drastically reduced. The lengthy procedure causes
problems. Not least of these is the necessity for a long pre-financing by participants. It is an issue we need to address urgently.
Moving on, late payments are particularly detrimental to SMEs. In this House we are constantly talking about SMEs that we want to support, and they are the fundamental driver of growth in the EU. However, their budgets are hard pushed to cope with such delays. Yet the Commission tells us that SMEs, as I said, must be targeted and actively encouraged to get involved. Perhaps before we try to encourage them, we should ensure that we do not actually discourage them. Therefore, please make the payments promptly.
The late payments also call into question the principle of annuality. Since the Commission has acknowledged these problems, I would strongly urge it to prioritise resolving them. The Commission must ensure that it evaluates, selects and awards funding in an efficient and effective way.
Moreover, in order to plan properly, participants need to know in advance the date on which the decision will be taken. This can be achieved only if future methods and procedures are simplified to speed up selection. This would lead to a much more coherent approach, it would avoid unnecessary bureaucracy for participants and speed up the negotiation of selected proposals. It would also lead to increased transparency by facilitating access to the programme to the very many organisations that I have mentioned before.
One barrier to this is the double verification system. The Commission should set up a single verification and certification system and adopt and publish specific rules that can be seen to be clear and fair to all the interested parties."@en1
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