Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-07-04-Speech-3-331"
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"en.20010704.9.3-331"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid I must begin by informing Markus Ferber from Bavaria that he will not necessarily find commonalities on those points where he hoped to find them. Let me explain why. He said that we must first establish a different form of institutional development for the European Union before we talk about the EU’s finances. I think this is wrong. This is especially apparent from the issues before us today.
If you ask any member of the public nowadays what the European Union spends its money on, 30% will say ‘to cover its administrative costs’, and another 30% will have no idea at all where the money goes. That means that 60% do not know what we do with the resources provided by the tax-payer. However, the tax-payers know that what they see as massive amounts of money are involved. Enormous sums of money are spent, and I think that today of all days, the general public would be astonished, yet again, by what is happening at European level.
On the one hand, we have a Draft Supplementary and Amending Budget. In one of them, the European Union, the Commission, shows that it has no intention of complying more than cursorily with the will of Parliament, at least as far as the sections on UCLAF or the new OLAF structure are concerned. We made a very clear statement on this issue during the year.
We wanted to shape personnel and the staffing structure in such a way as to create a new institution which fulfils modern requirements. In fact, it is only thanks to our colleague Herbert Bösch, who was willing to grasp the nettle, that no attempt was made to redeploy the staff and reshape this same institution – which, of course, was the focus of intensive debate last time – into another, which cannot develop entirely new structures as its personnel remains the same. This also deserves criticism here.
My second point is this. We will be returning EUR 11 billion to the Member States. EUR 11 billion means that we have a budget underspend of around 10%. We have an underspend in the field of consumer policy, where just 74.7% of funds are being used. Consumer policy – that is a word to savour! This is the issue we have spent more time and energy discussing over the last few months, if not years, than any other – and yet only 75% of its budget is actually being spent.
We have allocated funds to address one of the European Union’s major problems, namely under-employment. Let me give you the rate of expenditure in the field of employment policy: 39.6%. We have millions of unemployed, money has been made available, and yet less than 40% of these funds is being spent. Explain that to the European public!
We are handing back billions! In category IV, i.e. external actions, we see that just under 60% of the funds allocated to the European initiative for democracy and the protection of human rights – an issue which we spend hours discussing for every resolution, as well as under "urgent business" – is being spent. The rest is forfeited and goes back to the Member States.
Let me make it very clear: the European public must be told where the money goes. However, they should also be told where it comes from. That is being discussed quite specifically today, for it is always implied that the Member States provide the money. That is the case here today as well. We must ensure that the public understands the situation. We must make the revenue side and the expenditure side more transparent. We cannot continue to explain why we battle against the Council in the budget debates to secure an extra 11 billion, only to hand it back in the Draft Supplementary and Amending Budget at the beginning of the following year because it has not been used. The money then goes back into the relevant national budgets. We must move away from this situation. There must be a reliable and accountable source of revenue which is transparent to the public. Whatever form this takes, we must not cobble together a solution – Markus Ferber is quite right on that point. We must not be tempted, as a knee-jerk reaction, to agree any old solution as quickly as possible, for an uncoordinated, unstructured debate only leads to confusion. We must be able to manage this. Once we have set this up on the revenue side, once it is directly linked to citizens, and the expenditure side is then controlled by citizens as well – for they will look very carefully at what we are doing with the money – no further funds will be returned to the Member States. Instead, they will ask us: how have you actually managed the money? This is where we draw together the two issues which we are discussing today – the Draft Supplementary and Amending Budget, with massive movements of money on the one hand and own resources on the other. In other words, the issue is this: how much is the public actually paying for Europe?
In my view, there is no need to be frightened about telling the public what we are doing. We have good arguments, we have very good policy areas and policies, and we can present them persuasively. There is no need to be frightened of the public: we simply need to approach them very openly and transparently, and invite them to work with us on building Europe here."@en1
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