Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-03-13-Speech-2-091-000"
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"en.20120313.6.2-091-000"2
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"Mr President, I know that many of the questions have already been answered by our President so, if you will allow me, I will just focus on the issues which have been most frequently mentioned by the honourable Members, particularly jobs, growth and where to find investment in order to support policies in both these areas.
I would say one more thing even. I think that, if we look at investment policy, one of the best investment tools we have in the EU is the EU budget. Where in the world would you find a budget where 94% of the budget goes back to the Member States with the high value-added proposals supporting the programmes and the policies which are actually increasing competitiveness and cohesion among the Member States? This is how we have to look at the EU budget and this is what I am sometimes missing when we are discussing the EU budget and the MFF with Member States.
Thank you very much for your support for the Single Market Act and for your willingness to consider the possibility of fast-tracking some of our proposals, because we believe that by unlocking the single market potential, we can create a lot of new jobs and, indeed, new growth.
Finally, regarding Romania and Bulgaria and Schengen, you know very well that the Commission’s position is very clear. We are convinced that Bulgaria and Romania have fulfilled all the conditions necessary to join Schengen and we believe that both countries should already be members of Schengen.
But first, I would like to assure the honourable Members of this House that unemployment, and especially youth unemployment, is one of the five key priorities on which we would like the whole European Union to focus this year. This was the conclusion of the Annual Growth Survey. This is one of the priorities for the European Semester where we, of course, would expect this priority to feature very highly in the national reform programmes of each and every Member State because we are fully aware of how painful this is for our citizens and how difficult it is for our economies not to have enough high-quality jobs.
What the Commission will do further is that already in April, we will be putting forward an employment policy package. We are doing our best to help the EU as such and our Member States to improve the functioning of the labour market and to create better conditions for the creation of jobs. We would like to focus on the possibilities across the whole economy, but we would also like to be even more concentrated in the areas and sectors where we see a big potential for the new jobs, such as health care, white sector, information, communications technologies and the ICT sector as such.
We are also going to tackle the problems and the obstacles which still hamper the free movement of labour and labour mobility within the European Union. In particular, we would like to assist the young people who are witnessing unprecedented pressure on the labour market. We are absolutely convinced that we cannot afford to have 7.5 million young people who are not employed and not in education or in training. We therefore deployed eight action teams from the Commission which have already come back from the Member States with concrete ideas. We are going to implement them together with the Member States and the social partners in these countries.
Of course we support youth job guarantees. We would like every young European to have a chance to get – within a very short period of time after completing his or her studies – either a job or to have the possibility of continuing their education or, if there is not a particular job available, to work towards requalification or get into retraining so we can use the potential of our young generation in the European Union. To do that, we are also going to improve the tools which would help young people to seek jobs. We are going to improve and introduce the new scheme, ‘Your first EURES job’, which should help young people in finding opportunities on the labour market.
Then, of course, the question is where to find the investment and where to find the money to be invested in the economy, especially in this time of austerity where budget consolidation is a very clear priority. We would not like to repeat the dramatic events we have gone through in the last two years. With regard to the creation of new jobs and employment, we believe that we still can do much better with the money which is available from EU funds. To date, we have EUR 22 billion in the European Social Fund and EUR 62 billion in the Structural and Cohesion Funds which have not yet been spent. We want to help the Member States to have another look at spending priorities – how they can reprogramme them and use them for the active labour policy so we can create new jobs, for young people in particular, but, of course, for every European.
Several ideas have been mentioned as to where we can generate more income and more investments. I think that we have complete agreement on them because the Commission is very much in favour of the introduction of a financial transaction tax. It was a proposal which we made and we are working very hard with the Member States to convince them because, as you know, we need unanimity on this issue.
We are advancing our work on project bonds because our simulations show very promising results. We can actually use EUR 230 million from the EU budget and leverage it, together with the EIB, to EUR 700 million. This would end up, raising the money on the private market, with the sum of EUR 3.5 billion. This is money we can spend on infrastructure, on ICT and on projects which generate a lot of employment and which improve the overall competitiveness of the European Union.
You know that we support own resources and we make this point at every single negotiation meeting which takes place with Member States. You know – because you are getting the information from your negotiators – that this discussion is difficult but we are truly convinced that, if we want to have a more transparent budget and less drama when we are negotiating multiannual financial frameworks (MFF), we need solid own resources for the EU budget."@en1
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