Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-04-24-Speech-2-019"
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"en.20070424.4.2-019"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the share of the Budget made available for the policies that are the particular concern of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety is not a particularly large one; in 2005 – the financial year in respect of which we are now supposed to be confirming the proper handling of the European taxpayers’ money – it amounted to less than half a percent of the overall Budget of EUR 116 billion.
I will say right at the outset that there was nothing that prevented the directors of the four agencies – the EMEA, the EEA, the EFSA and the ECDC – from being given discharge in respect of their management of their respective budgets.
The first months of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s operations, in 2005, were successful, and the management of its budget was the responsibility of the DG Health.
In 2005, the European Food Safety Authority, in its third year of operations, was in the process of moving to Parma, which entailed difficulties in recruiting the necessary highly-qualified staff and without doubt made it impossible for all the funds allocated to it to be spent, so that over four million euros found their way back into the Community budget. How this money, which is the EFSA’s, is being, or is to be, made available for use again this year is not something for us to discuss in the course of this discharge procedure, but we will have to discuss this with the Commission.
The European Medicines Agency has done its work to our general satisfaction, and has not spent all its money, one reason for this being evidently that there were technical difficulties with the conversion of its IT system.
The European Environmental Agency did the excellent work to which we have become accustomed, made proper use of all its funds, and could certainly have done with even more.
The Committee on the Environment has no fundamental criticism to make of the management of its four agencies’ budgets, but we have taken the opportunity of this discharge procedure to demand of the two ‘old’ agencies – the EMEA and the EEA – that which is already required of the ‘new’ ones in accordance with the basic regulations establishing them, namely that their work be regularly reviewed and evaluated by independent experts. We would like to see added value to Europe assured by all forms of administrative activity in Europe – and that includes the agencies.
I will now turn to the side of the environment, public health and food safety for which the Commission bears responsibility, and here, although the take-up for commitment appropriations was highly satisfactory in all areas, it has to be said that the payment rates left much to be desired, being below 80% not only in health and food safety, but also in the environmental sphere. There are, of course, factors that explain why this is so; one is that the establishment of the executive agency for public health had not yet been completed, and, at the same time, staff were tied up in preparing the new health and consumer protection programme, while 2004’s problems with budget commitments resulted in payment problems in the environmental sector in 2005.
Understandable though the explanations given by the Commission’s offices are, the Commission must learn how to anticipate problems before they occur, in order to be able to take immediate action to address them; after all, it is not that lacking in experience of dealing with administrative problems."@en1
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