Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, as draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs I would simply like to begin with a few general remarks about the Structural Funds. 2001 was anything but a good year for the Structural Funds. It shows, with no ifs and buts, that the main objectives of the 1999 Structural Funds reform were not achieved. Firstly, as with the previous reform, this time, too, there were quite considerable delays in moving from the old to the new programming period. Secondly, the authorisation and administration procedures have not been simplified as originally planned. Thirdly, the approach of decentralising day-to-day administration of funds while at the same time strengthening controls has failed. The situation is indeed alarming. The Member States are far from having used all the money available to them. That is true both for the period from 1994 to 1999 and for the new Structural Fund period. In 2001, for example, only half the money originally envisaged by the Member States was called. We all know what that means. That is why the next Structural Fund reform, which will then cover not 15 but 25 states, will have to return to the principles that we actually wanted to implement with the last reform. These are first of all concentration on a few clear priorities, secondly simplification of resource administration, and thirdly a more performance-related approach to the distribution of funds, something I have called for repeatedly but in vain. The fourth demand would then have to be to avoid abrupt changeovers between programming periods in future. I come now to the European Social Fund itself. Let me please make it absolutely clear that we on the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs are very concerned about the sometimes very serious cases of mismanagement in the use of money from the Social Fund by the Member States and that we fully support the Commission here, Commissioner, in all its investigations and controls. Sometimes we really do get the feeling that some Member States really do not want to make the effort to improve things. As rapporteur for the last Social Fund reform, I was really very deeply concerned to read what the Court of Auditors has now written in its special report on the use of ‘social risk capital’, an instrument that this House pushed through especially in order to oblige the Member States to make a suitable amount of funding available as ‘grants’ to non-governmental organisations and local partnerships. The Court of Auditors notes that the Member States have made hardly any use of the instrument. In two cases, Germany and Austria, it was not used at all. I really cannot understand this. On the other hand, I have to ask the Commission why it did not inform us of this intolerable state of affairs earlier. The fact is that some Member States are clearly in breach of the Social Fund Regulation. I therefore call on the Commission and the Member States to find, without delay, a solution acceptable to all sides. This afternoon the Commission will be presenting us its proposal for the employment guidelines. We will then for the first time have employment guidelines for three years. That will at last give us an opportunity to make the European Social Fund – the only labour market policy instrument we have at European level – a genuine part of employment strategy because then we will no longer have different periods of validity. We now have for the first time the opportunity to coherently dovetail employment strategy and Social Fund measures in order to reduce unemployment and ... (The President cut off the speaker.) (Applause)

Political group: PSE