Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-29-Speech-3-146"
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"en.20001129.9.3-146"2
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". – Mr President, it is a special pleasure for me finally, and I emphasis the word finally, to be here tonight presenting this report. I recall that I first met Vice-President Kinnock in December last year when the parliament intimated that I was to be asked to take on this task. So it has taken eleven months before we have moved forward. It has been a very pleasurable experience. Certainly I echo what colleagues have said that the team of rapporteurs have worked very well together. It has been a pleasure to work together and I think the process of addressing a crucial reform of the Commission that is central to the future of the European Union has had added depth and richness because the four of us have been involved.
The focus of my report is on the strategy for the human resource reforms. I emphasis strategy because the Legal Affairs Committee has perhaps at least two years work ahead of it, although we hope not quite as long as that, in scrutinising all the reforms of the Staff Regulations that will flow from the human resource reforms. So we were keen to make sure that the strategic framework was in place and that it was the right one. Generally we are satisfied with that, but we are not complacent about it and I just want to highlight what I think are some of the crucial issues that the Commission is facing and how we can help them achieve this absolutely critical reform. One of the things that we were keen to do in our committee was not just to look at this in isolation but to look at what was going on outside. We held a very successful public hearing on the reforms where we brought in people from private and public industry to give us the environment, the organisational and human resource changes that are going on around us, in which the Commission is going to have to move forward with these reforms. Indeed it is going to have to recruit the best people in a very competitive market.
What was very interesting from those discussions was to see how employment and organisation practices in private and public sector are actually moving closer together. Big organisations everywhere now are becoming more open; they are becoming more transparent; they are using information technology in new ways; they are moving away from traditional vertical forms of organisation, sharing information across organisations and between each other. That is the crucial lesson that the Commission is going to have to take up in the details of its reform.
In the short time this evening I do not have time to go through all our specific recommendations in detail, so I want to centre on what I think is the key element of how these reforms must move forward. We must develop an organisation within the Commission that is going to centre around giving every official clear objectives, giving them the right resources to deliver those objectives. That includes the all important financial resources, as both Ms Guy-Quint and Mr Pomés Ruiz have emphasised, and
them to use those resources accordingly. They must be given goals to be measured against, but also rewarded in terms of salary and promotion depending on how well they meet those goals.
That is the core of what we are trying to do here. Those people who progress through the organisation will do so in a structured way with better career planning. They may expect to move to other European institutions, to be seconded to national governments, or to work in the private sector. That should become the norm, part of a standard career in the European Commission. They would also expect during that career to meet with people who are coming in from outside: on a short-term contract; a specialist, a young person who sees three or four or five years working in the Commission as part of a career plan. We should be encouraging those people alongside the structured career plan of the permanent service in the Commission.
We expect all this in a modern organisation in future. The strategy is right but the details have to be right as well to really succeed. In managing an organisation it is all very well having the rules and regulations in place but there are so many other crucial ingredients: the attitude of the staff, their commitment and support for the plans and their willingness to change. All of those will be crucial and the involvement of everybody, whether in trade unions or not, will also be absolutely essential.
Leadership from the top will be crucial. Vice-President Kinnock has tremendous enthusiasm for everything he does. He has led this process very enthusiastically, but it has to be led from the very top. I was pleased that all four of us had the opportunity to meet President Prodi recently. He assured us that he also gave these reforms his full backing. From the top all of these reforms must cascade down as quickly as possible to give the European Union the powerful Commission that it really needs to deliver its objectives over the next 20 years."@en1
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"empowering"1
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