Madam President, it is in itself an achievement that we are having this debate on the new URBAN Community initiative and it is an achievement that I am here tonight because Air France cancelled my flight at 2.10 p.m. – but I am here! Just a year ago when the Commission produced its proposals around Agenda 2000 it axed the URBAN initiative. Yet we as politicians knew that there was a groundswell of support for continuing this initiative into the year 2000. Parliament, therefore, can take credit for a successful lobbying campaign to put URBAN back on the agenda and get the Commission and Council to make a U-turn. Urban policy has always been at the forefront of EU policy. In my Member State, for example, we are developing a strategic approach in a White Paper and an urban government taskforce is looking at the problems of urban communities. With eight out of ten people in Europe living in urban areas, it is right that we help our most deprived communities to tackle the all too familiar problems of deprivation, social exclusion, joblessness, crime, drug dependency and all the problems that are associated with that. For example, in my own region, in Manchester, the URBAN Community initiative has been a tremendous success. URBAN funds have been invested in one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK, in Moss Side. The Millennium Youth Park project is helping to get young people re-engaged in regenerating their own community and in addition to support for small businesses and social policy we are beginning to see a turnaround of a very deprived urban community. The work of this URBAN agenda was then taken out to the wider community with an active communication and publicity campaign in local supermarkets and famous British pubs. This is the kind of good practice we would like to see extended across the EU in terms of communication and publicity. As regards the specific guidelines governing the initiative, they are broadly defined to give scope for local and regional diversity. We agree that they ought to be indicative in nature, allowing the maximum flexibility to ensure that we target specific programmes. In committee we are not in favour of reducing the number to 50. We are in favour of reduction overall but we believe that the arbitrary number of 50 is not the key factor. Instead, we should go for good-quality projects that can act as a catalyst to effect change and renewal, to attract inward investment in terms of loans and venture capital and to achieve a multiplier effect. The Member States should therefore be able to propose a reasonable number of areas within the financial ceiling of their allocations. In the designation of local URBAN programmes we need to make good use of local indicators and statistics on deprivation and health to enable us to more effectively target the most affected areas. In the UK the local index of deprivation is a very good example of a widely used standard and statistic to help determine not only EU but national and regional assistance programmes. This needs to be acknowledged as a tool and resource in addition to the EU criteria. I would ask you to take on board local indicators to help us do that. Our most deprived urban neighbourhoods face a plethora of problems: high unemployment and often very low-paid precarious employment, poverty and social exclusion. Often these problems are compounded by poor health and housing stock and a culture of drug dependency. We therefore have unstable communities which are infiltrated with crime, drug-dealing and gangs. This is all too familiar in many of our urban areas. All these complex problems undermine the quality of life for our urban residents, yet we have the potential in these areas to create growth and prosperity. That is why again, in my report, I have asked that action under the URBAN Programme should not merely provide a single solution to a single problem: these areas do not have single, “mono” problems. Instead, communities in urban areas should be encouraged to present integrated action plans to tackle their specific urban problems, using EU resources as a value added to local actions. I would like to see those actions extended to cover health and anti-discrimination, as provided for in the Amsterdam Treaty. The Community initiative means community involvement. Some of the most active and committed proponents and agents of change in our urban areas are local residents. We need to encourage them to participate in designing and delivering projects for these programmes. The time-scale therefore proposed by the Commission is very ambitious. It is better to have quality projects with the active participation of community groups than to have projects delivered on time but without local participation. The Commission must of course provide full disclosure and transparency concerning the selection criteria used for the new urban initiatives but it must also disclose the consultancy networks which are being used to deliver the exchange of good practice. This is important in the interests of transparency and the overall effectiveness of networks. Finally, I should like to emphasise that in order to address the problems facing the post-industrial city we require local participation. We need to deploy the energies of the unemployed, the underused skills of youth and the experience of age to tackle these problems. We shall thereby be able to replace poverty, dependency and alienation with equity, initiative and participation. This will help us to restore the credibility of the EU and the confidence of citizens that Europe can deliver local action to solve local problems. IN THE CHAIR: MR PUERTAVice-President

Political group: PSE