Madam President, I will do what I can. I would firstly like to congratulate Mr Stenmarck on behalf of the Socialist Group on a very solid and well-worked report. But I would like to go further and thank him on my own behalf for the good will and cooperation he has lent me in my temporary work as accidental shadow rapporteur. Ladies and gentlemen, as has already been pointed out, the preparation of the budget by the other institutions for 2003 has demonstrated the great pressure which the administrative needs relating essentially to the costs of preparation for enlargement exerts on the maximum limit of heading 100. My group fully supports the rapporteur with regard to the main objective, which is, quite rightly, to provide the institutions with the necessary means for a good preparation for enlargement to 25 countries, which is just around the corner. To this end, the rapporteur has tried to provide the institutions with adequate means to meet their priority needs. My group also supports Mr Stenmarck’s strategy of frontloading, in other words, providing for the use of surpluses available from the present financial year 2002 to bring forward certain expenses forecast for 2003 and therefore relieve the burden on the 2003 budget, as the rapporteur explained at length during his speech. Having said this, I shall focus on a series of points that my political group sees as priorities: First point. All the institutions – in fact, the European Parliament was the last – just before the vote in the Committee on Budgets, have presented, under pressure essentially from the Socialist Group, a budget based on a rigorous cost-efficiency calculation. And to use this twelfth language that Mr Wynn described as the Community jargon, the so-called ‘Activity Based Budget’ has been presented because it is clear that the institutions need a transparent system of financial management for the sake of efficiency. With regard to staff, I would like to mention two points. Firstly, my group has always supported the idea of the institutions having the necessary human resources, providing that the needs are real. We are therefore pleased that the Committee on Budgets has voted in favour of our amendment, in which we request a description of the functions and needs in order to be able to determine precisely what support is necessary in the case of institutional posts. But only for institutional posts. We therefore reject Amendment No 1 presented to the House by the Group of the European Peoples’ Party, which requests that it also be extended to Members of Parliament who have similar responsibilities. With regard to pensions, I would like to say that this is shameful. I was general rapporteur for the 1999 budget and in that report I placed great emphasis – almost a separate report – on the urgent need to resolve the problem of the pensions of European civil servants. We are now in 2002 and we are still making the same appeal. Mr Ferber, I would also have liked the Council to have been present, since that is the first obligation it must fulfil. Furthermore, my group has always argued that the citizens need to be aware that the European Parliament is their home; a transparent home. We therefore support a pilot project to broadcast plenary sittings live. And, Madam President, because there is no blank cheque here, with a view to the 2004 budget, the European Parliament’s Bureau should present us with relevant proposals in this regard.

Political group: PSE