Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-05-10-Speech-2-052-000"
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"en.20110510.6.2-052-000"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, I would also like to warmly welcome to this House the Hungarian Presidency and the President of the European Court of Auditors. On behalf of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) I should like to thank all the rapporteurs for their cooperation and also all the representatives of the institutions for coming.
I should like to point out to the Council at this early stage that Members of Parliament are elected to control the executive. The idea, then, that national governments should be allowed to control the European Parliament is an unprecedented attempt to weaken this Parliament. Consequently, your offer is not really an offer. It is an offer to make us small and weak. How would the national parliaments react to such a suggestion? If you would not dare to try it nationally, please do not attempt it at European level.
Regarding the discharge in the European Parliament I should like to say that improvements in management can be discerned under the current Bureau and the present Secretary-General. I would like to expressly acknowledge the PPE Group’s part in these improvements. We can see that action is being taken and that things are being done at our request – such as the intervention in the voluntary pension fund – that were absolutely necessary in order to avert the immediate insolvency of this fund in 2009.
I should now like to comment principally on the proposals to reform the Staff Regulations. These are paragraphs 77 and 81 in the report by Mr Chatzimarkakis. These proposals have led to unprecedented lobbying by those affected, including of Members here in this House. The criticism of the Regulations is justified, however. The Regulations are still living in the 1950s and have never been modernised. Travel days are calculated based on times taken in the days of steam and the benefits come from a time when working abroad was extremely unusual. They are no longer justified today. We have today our last and actually our only opportunity to have an influence ahead of the reform of the Regulations.
My proposals also concern the matter of whether it is normal for a member of Commission staff – not including their annual holiday entitlement, note – to have up to seven weeks paid time off, and this for all those earning more than EUR 10 000 net per month. In my opinion, overtime should definitely be included in this salary. What we are talking about here is creating new job vacancies. By removing some of these days off we could create around a thousand jobs. Instead of being days struck out, these new jobs could be used for Europe’s new tasks so that we can make recourse to the European Commission instead of constantly having to establish new authorities and agencies.
We should also seek to obtain a true overview of the administrative costs. The current 6.7% of the budget is far too low an estimate. It may be correct for direct management, but it is certainly not correct if we include all the administrative expenditure – including that in the Member States – for managing EU funds. I suggest that we produce an own-initiative report on the actual administrative costs of the European Union here in the Committee on Budgetary Control."@en1
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