Mr President, some things are quickly learnt. It does not take an expert on budgets to work out that the Council is submitting a proposal to cut down on posts. The Council is being self-congratulatory while ably wielding the axe. The Dutch Finance Minister, your colleague, recently claimed in public that the European Parliament is the big spender of the two arms of the budgetary authority. If one considers the struggles one faces in the course of the budgetary procedure, he appears to be right. It is true that Parliament often adds a little extra to the proposals of the Council. This is not because it is eager to fleece the taxpayer, but precisely because it wants to be a reliable authority, because it feels obliged to guarantee that the European tasks and responsibilities are actually carried out. Fine words and promises must, however, be translated into action, and that often costs money. I am already anticipating Minister Zalm’s criticism that another parliament building is surely a pure waste of money. I would therefore like to say to the Council that it should not come and cry on our shoulder now that many of these money-wasting decisions are taken at European summits. Allow me to quote the summit in Nice as an example. During that summit, the participants burnt the midnight oil in meetings to decide whether the Council should have one vote more or less. In order to ease the pain for the losers, Parliament chairs were being handed out lavishly. That, of course, is also telling of how much the Council values Parliament. It is better to have more votes behind closed doors than to have people’s representatives in parliament. This cattle auction will yield us 32 new colleagues, whether we like it or not, and our total number could temporarily even increase to as many as 800. Those members will need assistants and offices, and that was not, of course, taken into account when we first set out to build the current buildings. Do these summits ever stop and consider these issues? For we are left dealing with the implications. I would therefore suggest that at the end of European summits, the political conclusions should be published, alongside a rough estimate of the financial implications. And I would invite the President of the Council to act on this straight away. My second observation concerns the costs of the Council itself. Within category 5, administrative expenditure, the Council is the fastest growing institution, and that creates added tension within this category. To the Council, the financial perspectives are sacred, and that is why they aim to solve the problem by transferring certain expenses, which they would have gladly included in their own budget, to category 3, such as 3.5 million for Eurojust, and nearly 1 million for Schengen. That limits the scope of the European Parliament to determine its own priorities in this category. But I am an optimist: this situation also has benefits. For in this way, we gain a little more insight and we can indirectly increase democratic control. It does, of course, show where the priority of the governments lies if we are only given this control for the purposes of salvaging the Interinstitutional Agreement and saving some money. The reallocation of Eurojust to category 3, however, is not such a clever move. Do not get me wrong, I do not want to include Eurojust in the Council’s budget, but I would incorporate it under the administrative expenditure heading. This, given the nature of expenses, would also be the most logical solution, as the Council also tacitly recognised during the trilogue. I hope that we can at least agree on the principle, namely that operational expenditure belongs in category 3 and administrative expenditure in category 5. Or is the Council perhaps losing its nerve after all, given the increasing number of operational activities in its own budget? As already stated, the Council often has a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to deciding to lower the proposed expenditure. What Terry Wynn said is true: we have, after all, suggested a radical overhaul of expenditure, and consideration of what expenditure is still necessary, whether things should be done differently, whether a number of institutions are overlapping in terms of responsibilities, whether there are bureaux that duplicate the work. That has led to a guarded reaction from the Council, which surprises me greatly, for if we want to economise, then surely these are the areas where it can be done. We will also therefore take fresh initiatives to consider radical cutbacks nevertheless. But the Council does like to haggle, and it does not always take the actual needs into consideration in the process. Given the time constraints, I shall only mention one example, namely the Commission’s reform process. That is a priority for us both. Despite this, the Council only approved 89 of the 317 requested posts. You are quite welcome to be critical of the reform process and you need not approve all plans blindly. The repercussions of the schedule for advance resignation now await you. Given the above, I wonder now whether the Council is not simply waiting for us to take responsibility, for then it would, in the final analysis, be Parliament again which is calling for extra funding. Thrift is something to be welcomed, but one does need to enable the institutions to carry out their tasks. If not, the citizens of the Union, the taxpayers, will have something to be really disappointed about.

Political group: Verts-ALE