Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-15-Speech-3-532-000"
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"en.20120215.24.3-532-000"2
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"Mr President, I would like to say a special thank you to the rapporteur, Mr Vaughan, who I think is doing an exceptionally earnest and creative job with regard to Parliament’s own budget and the administrative budgets of the other institutions. I note, too, that he has received praise from practically all of the other political groups, which demonstrates that he has been able to establish broad agreement on where we currently stand.
It is certainly worth noting that a new attitude is prevailing. Up to now, Parliament’s budget has increased year on year, but now there is broad agreement that we should freeze the budget at a general level and that we should implement major savings in certain specific areas. There is also a high level of consensus that we should start to place restrictions on MEPs’ personal expenses. This is something that I believe to be extremely important.
The report has certainly made an impact, as we can see by the fact that only seven amendments have been tabled, which I believe is something of a record. If we look at the figures, we can see that, while we have traditionally always added 20% of the long-term budget total for administrative expenditure, we are now down to around 19%, and that, in fact, represents a saving of around EUR 70 million.
This is, of course, a result of pressure from the rest of the world, but the point is that we should not just make cuts. What we need to do, above all, is to find a way forward that is based on efficiency, modernisation and the principle of economy – and where this is concerned, I believe we are only just beginning.
I believe that this can be done without reducing the quality of our core activities. Above all, we must, of course, defend our legislative and budgetary work, but this requires a truly systematic effort. I am therefore very pleased that we have been able to agree on the establishment of a working group in Parliament with the possibility of drawing on external expertise in areas where we can learn a great deal: buildings, maintenance, energy, the environment, procurement, travel and so on. These are areas where we can learn from both industry and public administration.
In areas relating to the organisation of legislative work, interpretation, translation and so on, I am convinced that we can learn from other parliaments and other international organisations. It is also clear that this Parliament has costs that cannot be compared – travel, interpretation and so on – as this is the only multinational legislative parliament in the world, and that is obviously something that we need to take into account.
Lastly – and now I am speaking not as the coordinator for my group, but as a Swedish Social Democrat – if we seriously want to be respected for the way we deal with citizens’ trust and money from taxes, we cannot continue to move Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg in the long term. Therefore, I appeal to those governments that are now pushing for cuts in the EU budget: put this issue on the agenda in no uncertain terms."@en1
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