Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-09-Speech-3-346"
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Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to speak here even at this late hour, and thank you all for your understanding.
We should also be pleased if the Commission could prove why programme management is more efficient and better value when done by the executive agencies than by the Directorates-General. This is a request that those of us concerned with the budget have already put forward on a number of occasions, but has still not been backed up thus far in writing by the relevant facts and figures.
Parliament’s amendments serve to maintain an overview of the European agencies, and our urgent request to the Commission is to help us to bring more order into the agency landscape. As the Commissioner should know, we in Parliament trust the Commission on this issue. We know that this institution is our last resort, as it were, when it comes to creating order and transparency and providing a better overview in this regard.
I should like to thank my fellow Members from the other groups, and particularly Mrs Haug, the rapporteur on agencies from the Committee on Budgets, and the two rapporteurs Mr Mulder and Mrs Herczog from the Committee on Budgetary Control for their suggestions, all of which we have taken on board. I therefore believe that we have put forward the proposed and desired amendments by Parliament that are most pressing at the present time. I beg the Commissioner also to incorporate these amendments in the corresponding draft.
I requested permission to speak here. I am speaking for the Commissioner’s sole benefit, as I think it is important to tell the Commission that we consider the amendments we have tabled, on which we shall also be voting tomorrow with a very large majority, to be important. I wish to tell him that we are only at the consultation stage with this dossier, and I should like to assure him on behalf of the whole Parliament that our amendments will help to bring greater order into the agency system. It is therefore very important to us all across the group divide that the Commission take them on board. I am obliged to the Commissioner for his assurances in this regard, and I shall also be monitoring the situation.
It is very important to me that he also understand why we want this. We need better accountability in the agencies and greater transparency, particularly among staff members. This concerns our budgetary law most directly. The Commissioner will also be aware, of course, that if our wishes are not taken on board we shall find our own ways to fulfil them. We regard this essential to our budgetary law.
The Commission had originally intended the present reform of the Financial Regulation to consist of merely technical modifications. We talk of better regulation, yet I have noted with great sorrow that the latest joint decision on agencies by the Council and Parliament in July has not been incorporated. The Commission’s draft came somewhat earlier, but it would have been nice, of course, if it had been subsequently reworked. I should have also thought this fairer than leaving the work to us.
The European Parliament has introduced political changes with great unanimity right across the group divide. We want to bring internal operations, responsibilities, transfers of appropriations and accountability of agencies more into line with the operations and practice of the Commission Directorate-General by means of a declaration of assurance. We also want a better overview of the personnel and financial costs of the agencies. We want to be informed of all employees and not just those on the establishment plan. This is an absolute necessity.
I should like to give an example from a recent report by a decentralised agency on financial management in 2007. Thirty-nine posts are listed on this establishment plan, whereas 43 temporary staff and 11 contract staff appear in the text two pages before this. No two figures match, therefore. It is left to the reader’s imagination as to whether we now have 39 plus 11 posts or 43 plus 11 plus 39, or whether the 39 posts of 43 staff are listed and the 11 are then added. We just do not know. I shall clarify the issue, but clarifying this issue for the large number of agencies is no fun, of course, and reporting and the reporting system are more or less equally chaotic in all the agencies.
The agency I have just quoted, ENISA, is interchangeable with any other, and I should indeed like to ask why the information we are given is so full of inconsistencies. We also want more information on the agencies’ revenue – which, thinking of Alicante, can indeed be sizeable – and we want to know what is happening to this revenue. I thank the Commissioner in advance for taking on board these amendments – as he has just announced his intention to do.
Currently, we have 29 decentralised agencies with 3 914 employees on the establishment plan for 2007, with a budget of EUR 1.1 billion, EUR 559 million of which comes from the EU. The five executive agencies have 176 posts. The latest Commission communication on agencies was a very interesting one. The offer of a joint working group is very important. All three institutions must undertake to think through with each other the issue of the agencies’ future and area of work.
In Germany, the issue of agencies and the growth of agencies is in the public eye. The media resonance is always great. The reputation of the European Union is also at stake if we do not succeed in conveying to the outside world why we actually need these agencies and what role they play in the European Union."@en1
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