Mr President, it is certainly good, as Mr Wynn said, that we have this kind of generalised debate. We hope it will not be his last time for presenting this report to Parliament as the chairman of the Committee on Budgets, but there may be life after 2004. We congratulate the two rapporteurs, as always, but we would like in this particular budget to take a cautious approach to the budget overall. As the Commissioner and the President-in-Office of the Council said, there will be major changes as a result of enlargement, as well as activity-based budgeting. We will also have three different Commissioners between May and November 2004. It is going to be a turbulent year. For this reason, my group does not wish to see any opening of the revision of the Financial Perspective over the next 12 months. This would be an unnecessarily complex thing to start at a time when we will be out on election campaigns and the present Commission will be in its last year. We had great problems, in the last legislature in 1999, with negotiating a financial perspective which then tied not only the current Parliament and Commission, but also subsequent ones, to a situation where they could not revise it. It smacks of Soviet-style planning that we should start now to think of what financing will be like in 2013. We, as a group, would like to have a five-year financial perspective negotiated from 2005 to apply from 2006 onwards. I should like to refer to two points in particular. One is Commission reform. Last year we linked the Commission's request for new posts to a comprehensive review on what had happened on Commission reform. It produced a very impressive numerical report. What we would like this year - and we have tabled an amendment to this effect with one or two other points - is to have not only a report about what the Commission has done, but also a report showing what has gone wrong with the reforms and what still needs to be done to ensure that there is proper communication - Eurostat is only one example, though a rather high-profile one. The report also needs to show, quite clearly, where the reforms have not taken place. Is it true that, as Mrs Andreasen stated in a press release today, if the accounting systems had been put in place before, we might not have had this kind of problem? Who knows? We wish to clarify it and to have a document to that effect. The other point is the question of Iraq. Mr Wynn asked what the purpose of this amendment was. We believe that, at this stage of international development, Europe needs to show that it is not only capable of acting on the world stage and assisting with humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Iraq, but can also put a figure for this item in its budget. This figure pales into insignificance compared with the EUR 30 billion which the President-in-Office of the Council has said has been reimbursed over the last three years from the budget to Member States. A figure of EUR 500 million for next year focused on Iraq would show very clearly Europe's willingness to cooperate with the United States and others in bringing that country to the path of prosperity. In conclusion, we wish, as a group, to be able to be principled and responsible in this budget process. We want to ensure that parliamentary priorities will be maintained. All three issues which I raised are ones on which Parliament has the final say. You can expect us to be constant in the process which is now opening out ahead of us to the end of the year.

Political group: PPE-DE