Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-156"
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"en.20020924.10.2-156"2
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"Mr President, the Commission formulated three priorities in its Annual Policy Strategy: enlargement, security and sustainable development.
The Commission has now requested 500 additional positions to guarantee the smooth running of the enlargement. In principle, I can understand this, for if 10 new countries join, this will result in more work. However, I do have a few questions in this respect. Is it correct that you are now requesting staff for the priority of enlargement, while the priority of sustainable development is systematically being managed with too few officials? If I understand the Commission 'Better Regulations' proposals correctly, the Commission even suggests passing the responsibility for notification mainly to the Member States from now on. Is this because you really believe that Member States are better placed to comply with environmental legislation and to monitor it, or are there simply budgetary reasons for this, namely that you do not have enough officials to check whether the Member States indeed comply with this legislation? If this is a budgetary issue, I do fear for the priority of sustainable development.
Another question concerns the 700 positions which we rubberstamped in previous years. Am I right in thinking that these have been distributed reasonably evenly across the entire Commission and have not really been clustered according to certain priorities? It would be regrettable if this were the case.
I should now like to turn to the enlargement and the EU budget. If I understand it correctly, six candidate countries risk receiving less funding from Brussels in 2004 than they did in 2003, and four countries are even at risk of becoming net contributors. It is fortunate that you are prepared to compensate for this, and it is, indeed, excellent, but the bill could still be higher than estimated in these candidate countries if their implementation of the Structural Funds is not as successful as you estimated.
Is it therefore possible – and this is a proposal on our part and I would appreciate a response – to see if these candidate countries could take their projects through the entire procedure as early as 2003? In other words, if they could complete all the administrative formalities, so that they can start immediately with the real construction work on 1 January 2004?
Allow me to make one final point. If this is also a debate on what Mr James Elles said in response to Mrs Andreasen, my group is also of the opinion that any problems in the accounting system must be closely examined after the Commission's and the Court of Auditors' hearing. We would possibly need to invite Mrs Andreassen at that point. It is up to us MEPs, though, to examine this. As for the link with the Commissioners' wages, it is really beyond me how the PPE has worked this out."@en1
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