Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, this European Parliament own-initiative report now under our consideration is completely right. It makes perfect sense for the European Parliament to study, discuss and propose ways of improving the practical implementation and the management of the Structural Funds with a view to achieving greater efficiency. Despite the fact that the reform of the Structural Funds culminated in the 1999 Berlin Summit, which made substantial improvements to the way in which it is run, the experience of the last two-and-a-half years tells us that there is room for further improvements. The importance of the objectives of the policy of economic and social cohesion, of which the Structural Funds are a fundamental instrument, forces us to make continual efforts to improve. And we are all obliged to make this effort: the European institutions, specifically the Commission, but also the Member States and the beneficiary regions. What we really need is a continuation of the work to simplify and to minimise the bureaucracy of the functioning of the Structural Funds, which makes it necessary to improve management methods in areas such as the funding, monitoring, following-up and implementation of the programmes we support. By the same token, the Member States and the regions must be more selective in their choices of projects to support and ensure that appropriations are put to the best use and, for this reason, the ‘performance reserve’-type mechanisms must be improved in order to encourage and reward the regions that have made the best use of the Structural Funds. Furthermore, national economic policies must never neglect the objectives of economic and social cohesion at domestic level, and I would want them to be coherent and not contradict these objectives. The same applies to the other Community policies, specifically the common agricultural policy, competition policy and State aid, which could be of enormous value, because of the importance of the legal and financial instruments that underpin them and if they were better directed towards other plans for cohesion. Let us focus, lastly, on the need for greater decentralisation, or a more effective implementation of the principle of subsidiarity in the context of the European Union’s policy for economic and social cohesion. Obviously, there is still scope in this field to give the Member States and the regions more responsibility. The principles of decentralisation and subsidiarity must be taken as far as possible. We must, however, be careful. Let us not confuse, where the Structural Funds are concerned, the implementation of the principle of subsidiarity with a hypothetical and absurd renationalisation of the European Union’s economic and social cohesion policy. The principle of subsidiarity must never be used as an instrument with which to attempt to drain the financial resources of the European Union’s economic and social cohesion policy. What this principle requires instead is an effective policy, at European level, of economic and social cohesion, and it also calls for an improvement in the resources allocated to this genuine pillar of European integration, in light of the challenge posed by enlargement and by the drastic increase in the consequent regional asymmetries. Let us not forget that countries such as the United States of America allocate more resources to redistribution policies than the European Union. Mr President, to sum up, I say ‘yes’ to greater decentralisation of the management of the Structural Funds; but ‘yes’ also to maintaining and improving the essential functions of the European Union’s economic and social cohesion policy, which are the redistribution of resources and the promotion of development in its least-favoured regions.

Political group: PPE-DE