Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-24-Speech-2-240"
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"en.20001024.7.2-240"2
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"Mr President, in submitting the Budget for the coming year, the Commission has this time chosen a new method of presenting the figures. Instead of simply showing expenses distributed among accounts, the new-format Budget shows more clearly what we are getting for our money. We have the expenses distributed among policy areas and according to activities. It is a good innovation whose aim is more than purely educational. The educational aspect lies in the fact that we shall all be better able to see what we are getting for our money. As elected representatives, we are of course delighted with any move to make the Budget more easily understandable. When, however, expenses are allocated according to activity, this also paves the way for the Budget’s being seen more in terms of a political tool, in which the distribution of expenditure reflects clear political priorities.
This spring, Commissioner Chris Patten illustrated this by asking why the EU was appropriating more money to cleaning up after Hurricane Mitch in Latin America than it had appropriated to developing the Russian economy. That is the sort of question we must ask ourselves when we study the Budget, for it is of course questions of this kind that our voters will quite rightly be asking. With the new format, it has therefore become easier to understand and take in the whole picture, but the new activity-based budgeting must also mirror the reform process whereby the Commission establishes a simplified form of administration involving delegation and a clearer allocation of responsibility, and this is of course something more difficult to achieve.
There are major organisational changes under way, and there is a need for a new culture involving both a genuine desire to accept responsibility for implementing the individual parts of the Budget and acceptance of the fact that there are consequences if the responsibility is not fulfilled. I wish the Commission every possible success in these endeavours. As Commissioner Schreyer has already mentioned, there are many political announcements coming out of this year’s Budget: the reorganisation of agricultural policy, new structural programmes, measures to ensure better implementation of the structural policy, and steps designed to follow up the decisions taken at the Lisbon Summit for creating a stronger and more competitive EU and for combating social exclusion.
These are important topics, but the topic which deserves most attention of all is, of course, foreign policy. There is a great need for EU aid in both the applicant countries in the Third World and in the Balkans. In the middle of the Budget procedure, the happy day arrived and Milosevic had to step aside, and the many promises of economic aid to Serbia must now be fulfilled. All of us – the Council, Parliament and the Commission – agree that we must be thrifty, and we have all kept dutifully below the established ceiling for expenditure. So the discussion about how we are to obtain the money for Serbia does not have to do with any unwillingness to remain within a financial framework. I do not think our electorate will appreciate technical justifications in terms of the Budget for the fact that we cannot in harmony find the money for Serbia and the Balkans without reducing our efforts in other countries.
There is no popular demand to the effect that there must be no revision of the financial perspective. There is, however, a popular demand that we solve the problem of how best to provide aid to Serbia. So let us therefore find a solution which will last for several years so that, next year and the year after that too, we do not have to go through this discussion as to how we are to find money for reconstruction in the Balkans."@en1
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