Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-12-12-Speech-2-262"
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"en.20061212.42.2-262"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for allowing me to take the floor, despite my absence at the start of the debate. I should like to thank the Commissioner and my fellow Members, Mrs Guy-Quint and Mrs Jensen, for their words of appreciation to me, as well as Mr Elles and Mr Grech, for the positive way in which they carried out this budget procedure.
With this amending budget, we are giving the Member States back more than EUR 7 billion. This amount is partly due to the inclusion in the budget of a substantial increase in estimated revenue, and is partly attributable to a high level of under-utilisation of the appropriations voted on and available in the budget, in particular EUR 4 billion. This under-utilisation mainly affects the expenditure headings for agriculture, the structural funds and the pre-accession strategy.
We wanted to incorporate this debate in the one on the general budget precisely because the return of EUR 7 billion is not a trivial matter, but one that ought to worry us.
There are two aspects to the problem: on the one hand, the Member States constantly undervalue revenue, and this distorts people’s ideas about the percentage of wealth set aside by the Member States for Europe – in the light of these data and of the previous amending budgets, it is in fact quite clear that the amount of resources set aside by the Member States for the European purse is still less than the 1% prized out of the miserly national accountants. It is like me agreeing to allocate 1% of EUR 100 each year to a good cause and then, in fact, invariably earning more at the end of the year. Therefore, even you will admit that this operation by the Member States is not as generous as it appears.
On the other hand, even the resources that are actually available are not being fully used: if we analyse the typology of the under-utilised resources, we realise that the ones responsible for the under-utilisation are always the Member States, and not the Commission. I am not particularly generous towards Mr Barroso’s Commission but, in fairness, I must say that, where this issue is concerned, there is no direct responsibility on the part of the Commission, but rather that the main burden of responsibility lies with the Member States. We must take the opportunity afforded by this debate to encourage the Member States to be more effective in their monitoring and their controls and to be more vigilant so that allocated and appropriated funds are properly utilised.
Thus, instead of limiting ourselves to what is, by now, the tiresome exercise of blaming the European bureaucratic machine – the so-called Brussels eurocracy – let us also take a little look at our national situations, because if we more closely analyse the way in which our national public apparatus works, and if we call on the governments to work together in improving their administrative performance, then we might not have this figure of a EUR 7 billion return next year."@en1
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