Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-26-Speech-4-043"
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"en.20091126.3.4-043"2
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"Mr President, I thank the Court of Auditors in particular for putting forward this morning, in a very clear way, the contents of a massive report giving us the good and the bad – and thankfully not the ugly because, to some extent, we have cleared up the worst aspects of our accounting practices.
I want to concentrate in particular on agriculture which, because it has been given a relatively clean bill of health, has virtually been dismissed in this debate. I do so because I want to caution that we may be going back to the future.
It is worth remembering this morning that agriculture has improved because we have decoupled, to a large extent, payments from production. We are giving the payments directly to active farmers, active producers, and therefore the possibility of errors has been much reduced.
However, through the vehicle of modulation we are now taking that money and using it in the area of rural development, about which serious concerns have been expressed, hence my comments about our possibly going back to the future.
I also worry about how we can account for issues like water management, climate change and biodiversity. Think of the complexity of the rules that will surround all these things – and rightly so – if public money is being spent in that direction, and the difficulties and cost of complying with those particular rules.
We are looking at a review of the European Union’s budget thanks to the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, whose government does not have a particularly clean record when it comes to its own sets of accounts.
Again, under that review we will be looking at spending money in areas which the Court of Auditors clearly has concerns about, particularly in the field of research and innovation. Let us therefore be very careful that the good work we have done will not be unpicked by what we are about to do."@en1
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