Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-09-Speech-3-122"
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"en.20021009.9.3-122"2
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".
Madam President, first of all, I would like to express, at the beginning of the debate, my deep gratitude to the House, and particularly to the rapporteur, Mr Berend, and to Mr Walter, as well as to the chairmen, Mr Caveri and Mr Wynn, for the high level of cooperation between our two institutions and for the speed with which you have examined this proposal for a regulation. We must now work as quickly as possible, not least in the area of the budgetary mechanism, so that the first funds can be provided before the winter. I would like to be able to provide the first funds in November. Given the progress made in discussions within the Council this very afternoon, I feel that we can say that an agreement on this proposal for a regulation is now within reach, and I am pleased to say that this has been made possible thanks to a very broad consensus between Parliament and the Commission, of which Mr Berend was one of the architects.
During this final stage of discussions, we still have three points to tackle. The first is the definition of precisely which disasters will qualify for the provision of compensation. Parliament is concerned that the mechanism should not be gripped in the vice of an excessively rigid definition. The Council, for its part, wanted to classify natural disasters as priority. The Commission, as I said the other day before the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism, has studied the recent history of disasters in Europe in great detail. In recent years 80% of the disasters which have occurred are natural disasters, such as gales, earthquakes or floods. I do not believe, therefore, that it is inconsistent to agree to the priority requested by the Council since the option for the Commission to intervene in other similar cases – ecological, environmental or technological disasters – would still be available in a very small number of specific cases.
The second point concerns the threshold, or thresholds, for drawing on the Fund. Like the Commission, this House attaches particular importance to the fact that there are two criteria, either one or the other, and not just one sole criterion, so that we can fairly assess the impact of a disaster on the economy of a State, whether this State is a large State, a large country such as Germany, or a smaller State. I am afraid that, as we are quite aware, the smaller States in our Union are at risk of experiencing genuine, serious natural disasters.
Even though the Council wishes to significantly re-assess the criterion expressed as an absolute value – we had proposed damage estimated at EUR 1 billion, the Council is going no higher than EUR 3 billion – the principle of having two alternative criteria is not being questioned.
Finally, the third point, is maintaining a qualitative criterion to provide for intervention under exceptional circumstances to help a single region affected by a disaster. This is an absolute priority for the Commission, and it is the margin of appreciation that we have sought throughout the discussions. The higher the quantitative thresholds, and I have just said that they were increased in the Council proposal, the greater the need to have a margin of appreciation, because, of course, the worst thing that could happen would be, ladies and gentlemen, for this Fund to be so restricted, made so inflexible by very limited qualitative and excessively high quantitative criteria that, ultimately, it is never used. I have pointed out, and I reiterate this to the House, that, in 14 years, we have only identified, thank God, seven major disasters with a total amount of damages of more than EUR 1 billion. It is also for this reason that I proposed in the Commission’s first version to retain the quantitative threshold of EUR 1 billion. Once again, the worst thing that could happen would be for the Fund to be so inflexible, bound up in all sorts of criteria, that, once set up, it would never actually be used, even when peoples have been affected by disasters.
The Council is taking a very careful approach to the qualitative criteria. I would like to say here that neither the Commission, nor, I believe, Parliament, wants the functioning of the regulation to be hijacked by the systematic use of this qualitative criterion. The Commission wants to be and will be extremely strict in the use of this particular solution. What we want is very simply to ensure that victims of a disaster that is exceptionally serious for a single region can qualify for assistance from the Fund. Indeed, there are regions in Europe that are more at risk than others, such as islands, isolated or remote regions, or regions that we must protect, as, in fact, the Treaty stipulates that we must do in a specific article – and Mrs Sudre, who is present, knows it well – Article 299 on the outermost regions. I therefore think that we must have the facility, and it is precisely this facility that the Commission has provided, to help these regions primarily in conjunction with these quantitative criteria.
To sum up, Madam President, with your help and, on this basis, with the help of the rapporteurs, I now hope that an agreement will be reached very swiftly on this proposal for a regulation and on the amendment of the interinstitutional agreement. Because, behind the problems, the regulations, the thresholds, the rules, there are people – this we must not forget, I have met them and have been moved by their plight – people who have been wounded, injured, and are still waiting, and as we are quite aware, in addition to the injuries there are also people who have died. These people are currently waiting for Europe, together with the national and regional authorities, to help them reestablish, as a matter of urgency, the very basic conditions that they need to continue their daily lives."@en1
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