Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-01-Speech-3-023"
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"en.20000301.4.3-023"2
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"I am glad to be here together with President Prodi and my colleague, Michele Schreyer, to present the White Paper adopted by the Commission this morning: “Reforming the Commission”.
And finally, in the crucial area of financial management where the Court of Auditors, the Committee of Independent Experts and other external and internal analyses have strongly advised radical change, the support of this House in implementing the recommendations for full security of money and value for money will be of prime importance.
In the limited time available for this statement, it is obviously impossible to go into the full details of our proposals. I have no doubt that we will do that on several occasions in the coming months and years, and I certainly look forward to the questions of honourable Members this afternoon. It is clear, of course, that in many ways the really hard work starts now, with the implementation of our proposals.
I look forward to working with this Parliament, with the Council and with the staff of the institutions to ensure that the reform strategy is put fully into effect for the benefit of the Union and for the advantage of all of its peoples.
As honourable Members will see from the document, which will be available to them today, the unprecedented consultations with the staff of the Commission, with this Parliament and with the Council, which have taken place since the adoption of the consultation document in January, have been very productive and resulted in useful refinements. Together with Romano Prodi, I express my gratitude to this House and to the very large number of people who have put time and effort into giving us their constructive responses.
The White Paper puts reform in its proper political context. In the Commission, systems and structures have built up over forty years in which successive enlargements have occurred. The treaties have been revised, new managerial tasks have been attributed by this Parliament and by the Council to the Commission, and many other changes of great significance have occurred in our Union, in our continent and in the world. Those realities, together with the approach of further enlargements, all counsel strongly for modernisation of the Commission, so that this essential institution can fulfil its primary tasks of policy conception and development, of treaty application and of management of the public resources and do so with maximum effectiveness, maximum responsibility and maximum accountability.
The sustained independence and strength of the Commission are, of course, basic to that mission as this House has repeatedly recognised. Reform and renewal are essential for that purpose too. The Commission is not and will not be a secretariat of any kind, and that is clear to all of the institutions – it is well understood everywhere. But the Commission does exist to serve the Union and its peoples with high standards of performance. That is what the public has the right to expect and it is what the people who work for the Commission want to provide and will provide.
The House will be aware, of course, that the Commission cannot fulfil these objectives alone. All institutions in the European Union will have to face up to the issues posed by the reform and face up to them honestly and responsibly. I know that my colleagues and I can count on the support of many Members of this House across the spectrum.
One of the biggest challenges that may come from the essential efforts to match the tasks of the Commission with the resources of the Commission will confront this House. Last month, as Romano Prodi has just said, we launched a thorough evaluation of activities and resources throughout the Commission and we will fully report on that in September. Our aim is to focus the Commission on essential policy priorities and on core activities in line with our strategic policy objectives for the next five years. Inevitably, that will mean identifying activities that could and should be reduced or ended. It means taking a very hard look at how the use of internal and external resources can be most effectively balanced in the interest of the Union. It means allocating staff to areas of high-policy importance within departments and across the Commission. And when that assessment is complete, we will be able to establish whether the resources at our disposal are commensurate with the tasks attributed to us. If they are
not to be, we will put the case for more resources to the budgetary authority. If that does not meet with a positive response, the difficult issue of which of our lower-priority activities should be discontinued will then have to be addressed, not just by the Commission, but by this Parliament and by the Council too.
I do not make this point because of any desire in the Prodi Commission to retreat from activities or responsibilities. On the contrary, as many in this House understand, I am setting out these considerations because we want to meet our responsibilities and meet them with full effectiveness and full accountability. That means closing any significant gap between obligations and operational resources either by reducing activities or by increasing means or by a combination of both.
In each of the three pillars of reform, the active support and cooperation of this House will be absolutely vital. The new activity-based management system, that the President just mentioned, will link political priorities to the availability of resources and consequently to the budget for the first time. The role of the budgetary authority in the operation of ABM will, therefore, be vital. Attempts to micro-manage the Commission’s operations are clearly in no one’s interest. A resilient and practical interinstitutional agreement will, therefore, be a prerequisite for the efficient operation of activity-based management.
In human resources policy, the involvement of Parliament will unavoidably have to be as an employer of civil servants as well as a democratic institution to which the Commission is accountable. Again, that will be a very demanding challenge."@en1
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