Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-26-Speech-2-280"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20060926.25.2-280"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
".
The question you asked is very important for the Commission and all the European institutions. The proposal we got from the Council consists of two parts: one part relates directly to the 2007 budget and the other relates directly to the seven-year period from 2007 to 2013. I should like to elaborate on the consequences in your question for both elements of the proposal that we got from the Council.
Firstly, with regard to the 2007 budget, the Council has reduced appropriations by EUR 56 million. That means that the Commission would not even be able to maintain the current level of staff, while the Council has approved 801 new posts for new members for enlargement. However, it refused to grant the corresponding appropriations for paying salaries for those positions. It would make
recruitment impossible, from either new or old Member States. It also will not allow the Commission to replace its staff who will retire during 2007. That means that the real labour force will be reduced by about 420 people. No recruitment will be taking place at all with this proposal for 2007.
The question was also about agencies. For 2007 the Council also proposed to cut agencies’ appropriations by about EUR 29 million.
The second part of the proposal consists of reducing posts for the seven-year period. The Council’s proposal has two parts. Firstly, every second post becoming vacant would be deleted from each institution’s establishment plan. I have heard rumours that it is proposed for all three institutions – Parliament, the Council and the Commission. Secondly, the Commission would have to delete 500 additional posts, justified by the Council by the concentration of programmes and new managerial approaches. For the Commission that could cost up to 2000 positions during the seven-year period; for other institutions, such as the Council and Parliament, about 200 positions.
At the request of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgets, in early September I signed the working paper with all the detailed technical explanations and financial figures about that proposal. If you like, we could provide you today with that package for your information, in order to study the question in more detail.
The consequences only for the Commission will be a loss of close to 2000 posts, which means close to four DGs. It is also approximately half of the positions that have been given for enlargement during previous years. It does not take into account at all the fact that the Commission already started administrative reform on its own premises in 2002 and its ongoing reform. It also does not take into account that the European institutions are not national governments and the specific tasks which Parliament and Council perform are different. As an example, the European Commission, as a public civil service, is the cheapest public service in the world. In our budget all three institutions – the Council, Parliament and the Commission – only take up about 5% of the budget for administrative expenditures, while in most of our Member States they take up four or five times more.
We cannot agree because the proposal does not take into account the geographical balance. We need to keep within the requests of the Council. It does not take into account linguistic diversity, which we also need to keep. None of these things is taken into account.
Finally, we evaluated this as an attempt to reopen the debate on the interinstitutional agreement, which we signed just four months ago."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples