Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-01-Speech-3-141"
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"en.20090401.15.3-141"2
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Mr President, Commissioner, I too want to take my turn in thanking my fellow Members in the Committee on Regional Development for the spirit of cooperation in which we worked.
On a more general note, it is in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, in that it provides support to the Member States; it is in keeping with the principle of proportionality, because it applies to all the Member States; it promotes the objectives of cohesion policy, as set out in Article 158 of the EC Treaty, and it does not increase the Community budget for the period 2007-2013, but does speed up payments of advances and interim payments.
I should like here to clarify how important it is that we have added three additional forms of eligible costs: indirect costs, flat-rate costs and lump sums.
To close, I should like to say that Commissioner Barrot is here with us today, representing the Commissioner for Regional Policy, Mrs Hübner, and, as agreed, will make a binding statement by the Commission on the evaluation of the new measures for 2010 in connection with all three regulations.
Following the credit crunch which hit us several months ago, we all know that the Commission issued a communication on 26 November 2008 on a European Economic Recovery Plan for the Member States and their regions, based on strengthening the European economy and reinforcing the core values of the Lisbon Strategy for Growth and Jobs.
Among other things, this programme urges the Member States to re-programme their operational programmes for their structural funds and the energy sector, paying particular attention to improving the energy efficiency of buildings, given that the construction sector is one of the industrial sectors which creates large numbers of jobs.
As such, it has become necessary to recast the general Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006 on the Structural Funds. Within these frameworks, and more specifically as regards the energy efficiency of buildings, I undertook to recast the regulation in question as the rapporteur for the European Parliament.
As rapporteur, therefore, I should like to point out the following. To date the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) has only considered expenditure incurred by Member States which joined the European Union after May 2004 as eligible expenditure for housing, especially for energy efficiency and renewable energy in housing.
Firstly, I considered it useful in my report to focus the framework of the review of the regulation on facilitating energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy in the housing sector on all 27 Member States. I believe that this proposal is of major importance, given that it is based on the economic situation of a state or region rather than on the accession date. I should like here to point out that there are major problems in accessing housing in numerous towns and regions in Europe, which are not necessarily on the territory of a new Member State.
I then considered it useful to support a spending limit for the investments in question of 4% of the total ERDF budget and to delete the reference relating to low-income households, a recommendation that was included in the Commission's initial proposal, leaving it to the discretion of the Member States to determine the categories of households that will be eligible. On this basis, I considered it to be of decisive importance to leave the category of eligible households in the hands of the Member States, with the facility for the Member States to lay down specific criteria of interest, such as the financial standing of owners and the geographical areas (island, mountainous, non-mountainous and so on). Finally, the increase in the lump sums to EUR 50 000 is important, because it mirrors current costs.
I wanted in this report to express the European Parliament's positions on this issue, thereby also representing the compromise achieved with the Council within the framework of the codecision procedure on the changes which we made to the initial proposal.
The review of the regulation in question does not affect eligible expenditure in housing and strengthens the activity of important sectors of the economy such as the construction industry and the sectors which build energy systems and renewable energy systems."@en1
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