Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-10-Speech-4-023-000"
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"en.20120510.9.4-023-000"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, the Committee on the Environment is responsible for the budget lines for the environment, public health and food safety, and controls 0.76% of the Union’s budget. Overall, we were very pleased with the implementation rates. A full 99.26% of resources are tied up in the environment and climate change sector, while the figure in the LIFE programme, our flagship and our only financial instrument for the environment, was 99.4%. The rate was also above 99% in the health sector too. All the available information leads us to the recommendation that the Commission should be granted discharge.
I have been dealing with agencies in various capacities for seven and a half years. These seven and a half years have taught me that it is the decentralised agencies that do the lion’s share of the work in Europe, fulfilling the tasks assigned to them by the legislators, Parliament and Council under the ordinary legislative procedure. For seven and a half years, I have seen how the agencies are under particularly close public scrutiny. More than ever before, the specialist committees are particularly rigorous in exercising political control over the agencies. We want to know what staff in the agencies do, how they do it, and what happens with the resources from the Community budget. The agencies’ budgets are not arbitrarily organised in the budgetary process, nor are the agencies absolved of responsibility in the discharge process.
However, during these seven and a half years, I have never experienced so many half-truths, insinuations and misinformation being used to create an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion towards the agencies and the people working in them during the discharge process. This is not worthy of the working practices normally followed in this House. This fatal combination is the reason why the Committee on Budgetary Control has applied to defer the discharge for three agencies, the Medicines Agency, the Environment Agency and the Food Safety Authority. Of course, I support criticism of excessively high carry-overs to the next year and of the extremely high cost of governing body meetings. However, these issues do not justify the deferral of the discharge.
Speaking from my seven and a half years of experience working with agencies, I can only recommend that our decision in relation to granting discharge should not be based on an unholy mix of half-truths, misinformation and insinuations. With all the information available to us, we can confidently grant discharge to all agencies without exception."@en1
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