Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-06-23-Speech-4-051-000"
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Mr President, honourable Members, visitors to the European Parliament, cohesion policy is a central pillar of the European integration project and in overall terms it is one of the most successful policies of recent decades. We have genuinely succeeded over this period in reducing the differences in prosperity between the regions of Europe. The changes to the categorisation during the next period will highlight this fact.
I must emphasise once again that at the same time regional policy has become the central and sustainable investment policy for all European regions. If we want to ensure that Europe 2020 is a success and if we want to turn the strategy that is currently only on paper into concrete activities, initiatives and projects, it is exactly this up-to-the-minute, advanced form of regional policy which needs to be implemented in all our regions, in order to achieve the necessary results in our cities, communities, businesses, research centres and schools.
I would like to thank the European Parliament and, in particular, the rapporteurs Mr Pieper, Mr Mikolášik, Mr Vlasák, Mrs Sanchez-Schmid and Mr Stavrakakis for their excellent reports, which will help us to make progress with our work. The wide variety of the discussions held not only in committee but also on a number of other occasions has shown that this is the case. I am working on the assumption that many of these significant and highly constructive contributions will be incorporated into the design of future regional policy. Parliament and the Commission are moving in the same direction when it comes to the main aspects of the future development of regional policy and I would like to thank you for this. I want to make it quite clear that during the discussion about the transitional regions we rather lost sight of the fact that we have so much in common in this area, including shared priorities and very substantial proposals for changes in the future direction of the policy, which will make it even more successful, sustainable and visible and more comprehensible and tangible for the citizens of Europe. We have a common commitment to creating strong links between regional policy and the Europe 2020 strategy and to establishing jointly the necessary conditionality, so that we can help to overcome any difficulties in implementing the policy. We also have a common commitment to ensuring that our policy focuses heavily on results. This will ultimately enable us to find out what this policy could achieve with the targeted use of financial resources in all the individual regions by the end of the period and could therefore contribute to the central objectives of Europe 2020.
If I may, I would like to make some brief remarks on the individual reports. Firstly, I want to look at Mr Pieper’s report. I would like to emphasise what he said about being prepared to introduce reform and about the agreement in many areas. It is important that we are committed to innovation, to sustainability, to energy efficiency and to exploiting the potential of smart green technologies for the European economy and for safeguarding jobs in a competitive global environment. This has been discussed in this House and I would like to thank Parliament for its substantial support for the proposed creation of a so-called transitional region in the next period. We have had frequent discussions on this subject. It has been covered adequately and I do not need to go into detail about it now. However, I would like to emphasise once again that our concern has always been to produce a proposal to help those areas of regions which were not among the very poorest but which were still well below the average level and to provide support for the catching-up process. Nevertheless, I understand the concerns and misgivings which some people have expressed. I am prepared, and I will even take a proactive approach here, for us to consider towards the end of the next period the opportunities already available for a preliminary evaluation, in order to establish the extent to which the objectives were achieved in the individual regions, to assess whether the failure to meet targets was due to internal or external factors and to identify the conclusions we can draw for the allocation of funding during the period after next. These are sensible and necessary moves which will guarantee political acceptance in future and also the acceptance of the citizens for this type of European policy.
I would like to thank Mr Mikolášik for the clear commitment in his report to achieving results and for the explicit references to the importance and the future development of the strategic reports, the impact of these reports and the way in which they can be used.
Mr Vlasák, who has always campaigned strongly on behalf of the cities, and the entire team also deserve my thanks. Our cities are a central aspect of our key European objectives, although we must not ignore rural areas. I will never get tired of saying that if we are to improve energy efficiency we must begin in the cities. If we want to cut CO
emissions, we must begin in the cities. The fight against poverty is a struggle to improve the run-down districts found in all the major European cities. Therefore, there are many reasons why we must begin in the cities and, as I have said, we must not forget the rural areas. However, and this concerns Mr Stavrakakis, there is also a need for improved cooperation with the other funds in this area and, in particular, the fund for rural development. It will be necessary to ensure that the coordination with the Framework Programme for Research, in particular with regard to innovation, is effective, sound and transparent. This is because the key decision criterion in the case of research is excellence, which is not determined on the basis of geography. This is obvious from the fact that more than 30% of the research funding goes to 10 European regions which have this concentration. That is why it is important. In the current period we are starting to invest money from the Structural Fund in research infrastructure all over Europe, where the nature of the projects justifies this, and we will be increasing our spending in the next period. This will make it possible gradually to establish a broader base of research activities throughout Europe. In principle, small and medium-sized companies are also responsible for innovations, for example, in product development and in administration, services and marketing, covering a number of different layers. We need this broad base, because it is the small and medium-sized businesses in Europe which ultimately create jobs and safeguard them in the long term.
I would also like to thank Mrs Sanchez-Schmid for her contribution. We have already discussed territorial cooperation on several occasions. This is an area in all its variety and complexity which is one of the most European of our policies. It enables us to break down the borders which the citizens should not even regard as being borders and to make real progress with the process of European unification and integration. The new approaches, for example, in the area of macroregional strategies, demonstrate the potential of cross-border cooperation.
Thank you once again for your contributions. I am looking forward to the discussion. I can assure you that many of these thoughts and ideas will be incorporated into the proposal on the legal basis that we need for the next subsidy period, which we will be presenting in September this year. Thank you very much also for your ongoing support for European regional policy and for its development."@en1
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