Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-22-Speech-3-274"
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"en.20081022.21.3-274"2
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"−
Madam President, Commissioner Grybauskaitė, who understands Polish, but who will probably be less interested in my portion of the budget procedure.
We are coming to the end of a procedure we have called the ‘pilot’ procedure. It is a good occasion to underline the good cooperation with the Bureau and the persistent confidence-building between the Committee on Budgets and the Bureau, which is the result, inter alia, of the efforts of Secretary General Rømero. ‘Nobody is perfect’, however, and so certain differences remain, which is reflected in the reserves we set up for 2009. The budget for 2009 has to meet a number of particular challenges. This will be an election year, which gives rise to particular needs as regards public communications, which need funding. It will be a year in which MEPs will be given a new status, which will have financial consequences. I would also like to underline the new principles of employment and payment, which will be transparent and meet the needs announced earlier of assistants and the end of the pension fund in its previous form. We also had to restructure the budget in the second half of 2008 to make allowance for the highly likely scenario that we will be operating on the basis of the old treaties and that the Lisbon Strategy, which would change the competences of the European Parliament, will not come about.
We have succeeded in keeping the budget below the voluntary threshold we set, i.e. below the 20% threshold for the administrative expenses of the institutions of the European Union. We should accept these levels, both in the administration and in the political groups, as they are tied to the better functioning of legislative activity, making the lives of MEPs easier, and improvements in the new comitology, which should also be provided for in 2009.
We would like, and are implementing reserves for this purpose, to gradually even out certain disproportions that have arisen over this long period in various sections of the Parliamentary administration, to provide resources primarily to those services that are directly related to the work of the Parliamentary committees. We have noted other initiatives that can improve the functioning of Parliament, namely in the Parliamentary library, particularly the Knowledge Management System. We also note that the new Visitors’ Centre will unfortunately not be open at the time of the elections. It was announced that it would be open, but it will not be. We can count on it becoming operational towards the end of 2009, which is also reflected in our staffing reserves.
Keeping to the budget is a philosophy common to Parliament and the other institutions, and particularly during an election year we should avoid presenting the European institutions as excessively ambitious as regards the cost to the European taxpayer. The same applies to other institutions, where we weighed up all of this, all the decisions taken by the Council, and added to it our own assessment of the needs of these institutions. There are two undertakings I would like to underline: for the Court of Justice, we have 39 new posts connected with the new agency procedure, and in the Court of Auditors we have three new posts which increase the organisation’s potential, but which also make it possible to finance its new headquarters by means of frontloading.
This heralds a smooth, rapid vote tomorrow, which is the result of excellent cooperation with the coordinators of the political groups, the draftsmen of the opinion of the committee, not forgetting the running of the committee by Mr Raimer Böge. My particular thanks to the people who helped me in this, namely Richard Wester and Marrianna Pari."@en1
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