Mr President, firstly I would like to thank Mr Costa Neves and Mrs Buitenweg for their excellent reports. The 2002 budget guidelines clearly show the budgetary policy the European Parliament is to adopt. Parliament wants to simplify EU administration and make it more efficient, underline the importance of the personal responsibility of officials, improve the way the budget is implemented, strengthen economic development and promote sustainable agriculture. Commission reform and making administration more efficient are key objectives. To achieve this the intention is to move towards an activity-based budget and administrative system. People must be responsible for their own actions in matters of efficiency and economy. Personal responsibility must be taken for delays, and the same applies to the fluidity and legality of financial operations. In this regard the reports clearly allude to the slow handling of the Structural Funds programmes by the Commission. We shall return to this subject in connection with the discharge procedure for 2000. In the reports, the key to smooth, efficient and responsible administration is a newly revised Financial Regulation, which is an urgently required measure. Parliament is also demanding that delays and arrears should be dealt with. My own group demands that the problem of arrears should be sorted out more effectively, and says that we should be able to dissolve outstanding commitments after a certain period of time has passed. One particular problem is the agricultural budget. The margin in its financial perspective has been almost used up as a result of the BSE crisis. The idea of savings in the agricultural budget, which was discussed at Berlin, would not appear to be the solution at present. The BSE crisis is jeopardising the entire budget because of the need for extra storage and exports. In this connection, however, I cannot personally agree with Commissioner Schreyer’s publicly expressed call for a cut in subsidies. Farmers are the only section of the population in Europe whose income levels are determined directly by the EU. For that reason, they cannot be expected to foot the bill personally for the BSE crisis. Agricultural aid does not encourage over-production, because it is not connected to the volume of production and is based on surface area and number of livestock. We must remember that our fiercest competitor, the United States, subsidises agriculture on a scale that is clearly greater than in the EU. It would be important if the Commission were also committed to Agenda 2000. The main question for the future will be the trend in administrative expenditure under heading 5. The Council is developing its own military crisis management organisation and has asked, among others, for 51 new posts in the second supplementary budget in the middle of the budgetary year. Crisis management is clearly a matter of operational expenditure. For that reason, the Council must explain more clearly what the issue is here, in other words, is the Council creating a ‘new Commission’ for the EU’s second pillar, one which would be outside Parliament’s budgetary authority? As this is clearly a case of non-compulsory expenditure, Parliament cannot endorse these plans.

Political group: ELDR