Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-04-21-Speech-3-039"
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"en.20100421.3.3-039"2
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"Mr President, to begin with, I want to thank the Council, and I appreciate the fact that the Council is present, because the question is whether the Council really wants to take responsibility for spending taxpayers’ money, and whether the Council wants to show some respect for Parliament and for cooperation. Therefore, it is important that the Council is present.
In my speech, I will concentrate on Parliament’s discharge, and I want to thank Mr Staes for his very high level of cooperation. I agree with him on the very sound basic idea that Parliament can only work well if decision making is sufficiently open and transparent. In this way, we can make sure there are no scandals. We know that, however small the amounts of money we are talking about, if malpractice starts to appear, our reputation will be damaged for a long time. It is extremely important to prevent this from happening. We are not talking about Parliament’s money, but taxpayers’ money. The system must therefore be watertight, so that we can, in the end, take responsibility for this.
There were many good principles in Mr Staes’s report, but my own group took the view that the report should be shorter and more concise, and because of this, we removed some material from the report. In addition, we believe that there should have been concrete items in the report dealing with the activity of MEPs and Parliament as a whole in actual legislative work.
For example, we have added some items concerning real estate policy, in which there is still a lot of room for improvement. We need to obtain an accurate and clear explanation of why there are problems in this area. This is the reason for the long debate. We want to know why the visitors’ centre is already a few years late according to the timetable. What could the problem be here? We want answers to these questions.
We should give congratulations here, regarding the fact that at last, Parliament has quickly got new regulations both for Members and for aides too. It is true that this has been a big improvement, but there is still a lot to change here.
Let me give an example. According to the new regulation, I first have to fly from here in Strasbourg to Finland, and only from there can I fly to Brussels. Even if I had a visiting group in Brussels or a report to prepare tomorrow, this would not make any difference: I cannot go from here straight to Brussels. If I did so, I would not be paid travelling expenses or any other compensation.
I do not understand why our lives need to be so inconvenient, when we know that the journey from here to my home town of Turku in Finland takes a day, and it takes another day to come back from there if I want to go to Brussels to do some work there. When I asked why this is the case, the administration answered that I could fly to Finland via Rome or Athens. I do not have an office in Rome or Athens, or any work to do there; these are in Brussels.
If we have two workplaces, then it is reasonable for us to be able to work in both places. There are still areas where we need to get back on to the right track. We will return to these in next year’s report."@en1
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