Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-12-Speech-2-053"
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"en.20020312.3.2-053"2
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".
Mr President, I would just like to go over again a number of remarks made in the very interesting discussion on the priorities for the budget year 2003.
First, the issue of the low take-up of resources in the last two years of the structural policy. Mr Puerta had called for the Commission to be constantly giving information about the use to which Structural Fund resources are put. Let me again point out that the Commission supplies information on this to the Committee on Budgets and to the Committee on Budgetary Control on a weekly basis. The Structural Fund stipulates that the Member States must be reimbursed in respect of the resources provided by them; if the implementation of the Structural Fund in the Member States is held up, we cannot of course carry out the refund. It is with regret that we note here that the new Structural Fund programmes have taken longer to implement than the Financial Perspective had originally envisaged. I see the consequence of that as being that the next Financial Perspective will require the Council's and Parliament's decisions to be produced earlier in order to guarantee better implementation.
As regards the issue of bottlenecks in individual categories, I would just like to point out that the European budget for 2002 faces us with a situation which is out of the ordinary and will assuredly not continue in the coming years. The fact is that this year we are far, far below what financial planning estimated, to the tune of EUR 4.6 billion below it! None of the Member States comes near matching us on budgetary discipline of that sort.
Next year, then, we will need more resources for the Structural Fund, as the Member States are demanding that all the programmes should run for longer, something which should actually have been concluded a long time ago, and hence the situation will look rather different. It is, despite that, possible to state already that the Agricultural Policy will probably not require all the resources estimated. This means that economies are to be reckoned with. Budget technique does not, unfortunately, make it possible to use savings in any one sector to fund new foreign policy requirements or the preparation of the institutions for enlargement. Such a redirection is not possible, and the only means available to us is the flexibility instrument.
With reference to enlargement, I would once again like to clarify that what financial planning provided for the financing of new Member States in 2003 was provided exclusively for that purpose. We cannot redirect that, and also reject the option of doing so, but we do have the flexibility instrument. Let me again point out that, as soon as enlargement is completed, new resources will be allocated to administration. It is only for the preparations that they have not been set aside. If enlargement is to be successfully handled, though, preparations for it will be of fundamental importance, and they must be made in 2003 by all the institutions – Parliament, the Council, the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Auditors, and by the Commission as well. We are not talking here about excessive sums of money, but in terms of amounts that would still leave room in the flexibility reserve for other measures. We should subject this instrument to serious testing in this respect. It is the citizens of the new Member States, above all, who are entitled to European institutions that are prepared and ready to make a success of enlargement."@en1
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