Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the resignation of the Commission in March 1999 highlighted the need to reform its structures and working methods. The energetic reform exercise it is now undertaking must seek above all to restore public confidence. The need for reform is beyond doubt and the Commission must become a first-class administration in the service of our political objective. That is an essential condition for lending credibility to the construction of the European Union. Following the reports by the independent experts, the Commission, at the initiative of Mr Kinnock, presented a White Paper proposing reforms to the way it functions. Officially, our Parliament is consulted simply with a view to delivering an opinion, but Mr Kinnock assured us that our views would be taken very seriously in the Commission's further activities, in which we will be associated. Given the scale of the task, four committees were involved and a hitherto unknown procedure was applied, in the form of four parallel reports. Let me now welcome the work done with my PPE colleagues, Mr Pomés Ruiz, Mr Harbour and Mr Lamassoure. So we decided on a method of looking at the entire issue, without any overlaps. That method was respected and involved us in a major consultation process. It enabled us to take a common approach, which respected each committee's terms of reference while seeking a real, underlying consistency among our reports. However, I want to point out that the considers it essential for the reform to respect the treaties in a very pragmatic way. The cohesion between all the reform sectors should assure the people of Europe that the methods by which European integration is managed politically are clearly visible and truly transparent. Obviously the modernisation of a structure as complex as the Commission requires diplomacy, patience and trust on the part of the various players, and particularly the staff. That is why we want to ensure that this process is not imposed from above; we consider it crucial that all the staff are effectively associated in this whole process of modernisation. Although it may be led from the top, the reform must be clear and visible to the unions, to all the staff, who must be effectively associated in this whole process. We are firmly resolved to give a new dynamism to the European civil service, but that means we must respect certain principles: the European civil service must continue to be governed by a single set of interinstitutional Staff Regulations, which ensure that every official is recruited at the same basic grade and provide for real mobility, access to real training. The recruitment procedure must always guarantee equal opportunities to all EU nationals. The Committee on Budget's opinion on the reform concentrates on these major aspects, in line with our powers and responsibilities. The leitmotif is the systematic reminder that, parallel to any legislative procedure, all budgetary decisions must be taken in the framework of the related annual procedures and the Interinstitutional Agreement. Parliament has a great responsibility towards the citizens. As an arm of the budgetary authority, it must ensure that public monies are properly used. Moreover, over and above all other considerations, we will be even more careful in future to ensure that the Commission really does spend the adopted budget on implementing the various political priorities our Parliament has democratically decided, rather than reallocating it on the basis of functional weaknesses. The package of measures proposed in the White Paper must help modernise the whole way the Commission functions and make it more efficient. We will support it and ensure that these procedures lead, as soon as possible, to a management culture geared to results and performance criteria, taking account of the cost-benefit ratio but also of our political priorities, and remembering that decentralisation and delegation of authority are essential tools, provided that power of decision and of supervision are guaranteed. The communication from the European Commission must deliver a common message to the various institutions. In concrete terms, it is crucial to review the procedures for honouring the budget votes. The non-execution of the budget, the excessive delay between inclusion in the budget and commitment, and then the payment of appropriations, is a caricature. It is extremely urgent to find ad hoc procedures to restore credibility to the Commission's activities. That means we must review the procedures and fix realistic objectives so that the backlog can be cleared rapidly and the delay between commitments and payments, which undermines the credibility of a large part of the budget, can be reduced. We must also provide for the suspension of contracts if there is no longer any consistency between budget appropriations and political commitments, and for paying subsidies and commitments at an early date. The credibility of the Commission, and therefore of the European Union, depends on its ability to reform its financial management systems very quickly. In the medium term, it is essential to fine-tune the budgetary procedures and ensure closer consultation between the budgetary authority and the Commission at the beginning of each financial year. That will avoid our plunging into the great difficulties we experienced in November and December and into situations that do not enable Parliament's political expectations to be translated correctly or allow for the real modernisation of the functioning of the Commission. An annual evaluation of the changes in the functioning of the Commission and of the additional cost of this reform requires consultation at the beginning of each financial year. That measure will take time, but it is inevitable and crucial to the reform. The introduction of global management by project must be accompanied by a new nomenclature to ensure transparent management. We are very much in favour of that. We will make sure that all the technical provisions can be implemented on the basis of full respect for Parliament's rights as an arm of the budgetary authority. Our committee was very pleased to see the conclusions of the Bourlanges report on externalisation taken up in the Letter of Amendment. However, in regard to commitology, the Member States all too often promote national interests that are at odds with those of the Community and consultation of their committees slows down the decision-making process and increases the cost. So the reform must provide an opportunity to restrict their intervention solely to areas where no expenditure is involved. I shall not dwell on the question of human resources since Mr Harbour has addressed it. The Commission's human resources are obviously not up to the new tasks entrusted to it, in addition to those it will have to assume in the future, and the redeployment proposed in the Letter of Amendment, which only relates to 4% of staff, will not resolve the human resources problem either. In accepting the substance of the Letter of Amendment during the budgetary consultation procedure last Thursday, the Council proved that the other arm of the budgetary authority did in fact wish to support the reform of our Commission. The questions of audit, management and financial control are basically dealt with in Mr Pomés Ruiz's report. The Commission's position on the recasting of the Financial Regulation has been known since 22 November. We expressed our views on the reform of the fast-track procedure in the vote on the van Hulten report. Yet we would point out again that it is absolutely vital to guarantee independent financial control. Moreover, it is totally illogical for the Council alone to be able to amend the Financial Regulation and we repeat our call for conciliation on this issue. The reform of the Commission is crucial to the future of our institutions. The working method chosen by the Conference of Presidents, which some found rather risky, took time. But looking at the four reports as a whole, this period of consultation has allowed us to take both a broader and a closer view, which has increased the value of Parliament's opinion. This report looks at the very first steps in the reform of the Commission, a major project aimed at the genuinely modern management of the Union. It will be followed by many other reports and, for my part, after these weeks of working together, I hope we adhere to this method in future too. I want to give particular thanks to the other three rapporteurs, for I really appreciated the way we worked and the clarity of their positions. The differences of view that emerged are not just political but more a reflection of the cultural differences between the Fifteen. They show that the very different approaches to the management of the public service we see every day in the different EU institutions, as also in our political groups. The implementation of this reform clearly reflects the difficulties we are facing, but we know that this exercise, however difficult, is a vital one. Together, we have contributed to this first stage that is crucial for the political future of the Union; we have modernised its management to make it more transparent and therefore bring it closer to our citizens, so as to convince them more firmly that their only future lies in a stronger European Union.

Political group: PSE