Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-17-Speech-3-019"
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"en.20081217.3.3-019"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to give a special vote of thanks to the representative of the French Presidency, Mr Sorel, who has set a wonderful example of collaboration with the Committee on Budgets by attending all the debates we have held.
I have a final thought. The two Community programmes most affected by the 2006 financial perspective agreement – trans-European networks and rural development – are the ones that have now been chosen to boost Europe’s economic growth from Brussels.
My question is: who should now be held responsible for having cut them back so hard in 2006?
Parliament’s work on the draft EU budget is once again reaching a satisfactory conclusion this year. We have needed the many years’ experience of negotiating between the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. We know the limits of each institution and we have been able to reach agreement on the basics, so tomorrow’s vote may be presented as an institutional success for the European Union.
All these years of mutual familiarity also tell us, however, that the agreement on basics this year falls short of those basics that we ought to be able to demand under normal circumstances.
The problem is that this draft budget was planned many months ago in March or April without taking into account the huge scale of the economic and financial crisis. It is not uncommon, therefore, since some Member States have also done so, not planning far enough in advance.
Our budgetary procedure is essentially very rigid and does not allow for corrections along the way. Parliament made some proposals at first reading that did aim to help with economic revival and provide a safety net for citizens, mainly through amendments tabled by the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and also the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. Some of them were adopted by the Council, while others were not.
It is only at the end of the process, once conciliation has already taken place, that the Council and the Commission are finally coming up with great ideas about how to use the EU budget to boost economic growth. When improvisation is combined with urgency, the most likely outcome is disappointment.
In the end, the response to the economic crisis will be made at national rather than Community level, and the EU budget will not, unfortunately, be the powerful economic policy instrument that it should have been.
What I cannot understand is why, in the economic boom years back in 2005-2006, the financial perspectives that were approved were so pared back and limited that the annual budgetary policy could not be used as a countercyclical weapon.
We are hamstrung by the annual ceilings, and the multiannual financial framework is of no use in crisis years."@en1
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