Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-22-Speech-2-022"
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"en.20080422.4.2-022"2
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"Mr President, welcome to this debate, attended by the Secretary-General and of course welcome to Mr Kallas. I cannot welcome anyone from the Council, as it appears that it does not have anything to do with accounts and taking responsibility for the political debate on discharge. I hope that when the Council has a president, after the Treaty of Lisbon, we will be guaranteed that the Council will also be present at this debate.
I would first like to congratulate my colleague Dan Jørgensen on his excellent report, and highlight from what he said how well things are being done in the European Union, and how they are being done better every year. He referred on several occasions to an initiative by Commissioner Kallas and the Commission on transparency. I was rapporteur two months ago for an own-initiative report supporting the transparency policy. Well, the Commission is indeed making progress on transparency policy, as Parliament has also done.
I would like to point out that the role of Parliament in giving discharge is a political role, and that we are not and nor should we be accountants. It is a political role, and the question that we have to answer for citizens is: with the money that Parliament has, have we been able to meet the budgetary challenges for the 2006 financial year? Challenges such as Parliament preparing for enlargement, to receive new Member States, expanding the information policy, doing our work better, preparing ourselves for the challenge of Lisbon, in that we are going to have to legislate more and in the best possible way.
What is the political verdict on what we have done with these financial commitments? It is a positive one. We have done well. I would like to highlight a few points from this financial year. Firstly, on the initiative of President Hans Pöttering, we have initiated a political dialogue between the Presidency and the procedure for discharge, which until now did not appear to be possible. Now it is possible, and your vice-president was present at the debate, facing up to the questions put to him live and direct by the committee. Also, on the initiative of the President, the Bureau is going to have a regular procedure of working with the Committee on Budgets and the Committee on Budgetary Control, so I thank you.
Many aspects of transparency in Parliament have improved, as you can see in the report. We have improved the presentation of the roles of our assistants. What has not been possible this year has been for us to finally create a statute for assistants, which we are asking for. The truth is that as MEPs it has taken us a long time to have our own statute. In short, we will have to ask for patience, but we must emphasise that we have not yet achieved this objective. In 2006, however, the reference year, 99% of papers were submitted in the right way, so I think that this issue is also moving in the right direction.
We have outstanding problems, and on these we are more or less trying to do what we can. Citizens do not understand why Parliament should have three locations, they do not understand it, and they are not going to understand it because it is not easy to understand. This is another challenge for when the Council has a president: finding a solution. Parliament has, however, done its duty and reduced the cost of the three locations from EUR 203 million in 2002 to EUR 155 million. We have cut the bill by 24%, which is good.
What challenges are we going to tackle, as I mention in this report? As I have just said, giving our assistants a definitive statute, as we have ourselves. There is also the challenge of legislating better. Parliament is going to play a much greater qualitative role and have a much larger workload with the Lisbon Treaty when it comes.
Let us hope that the Belgian Government, now that we have a Belgian Government, will treat us a little better in terms of buildings policy than it has up to now, as its treatment has been mediocre.
I would like to finish by saying that we have had a prudent year in terms of our budgetary responsibilities, and this is why I am asking you to vote in favour of these accounts for 2006."@en1
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