Mr President, we have already had the opportunity, at the first reading, to examine this report and I was given to believe in committee that there was a broad consensus within this House. LIFE is the only budget line for direct assistance for the environment in the Community budget, and one cannot help but note that it does not live up to our ambitions since the amounts allocated to it have been stagnating for years. Despite the enlargement which has already taken place, when we renewed the first LIFE programme to move on to the second, despite enlargement, the level of appropriations remained the same. And then we see that, increasingly, the regions, the various operators, businesses, associations, are submitting LIFE projects, both for LIFE-NATURE and LIFE-ENVIRONMENT, projects that are of excellent quality, which following technical assessment by all the competent committees are unanimously found to be worthy of European Union support, but we still cannot fund them, for lack of budget appropriations. It must also be mentioned that this budget experiences a rate of consumption of appropriations which is quite exceptional within the Community budget. Patently we have here an instrument that is appropriate for the policies which we wish to implement. I would stress the LIFE-NATURE strand in particular. We are well aware that, in the European Union, a whole raft of directives such as the directive on habitats and the directive on migratory birds encounter problems in implementation. With LIFE-NATURE we should be able to support policies which demonstrate the feasibility, the validity of the objectives of these directives, and their capacity to be implemented. And, for want of appropriations, we lose this legitimacy and allow the idea that these European directives of ours are not reasonable and are not applicable to develop. And so the debates taking place today focus on two major issues: firstly, comitology, an ongoing debate within this House, but Parliament wished to implement policies settled rather by management committees or advisory committees which give the Commission some flexibility and which do not give the Council too much scope to obstruct and have their intergovernmental philosophy prevail over the Community philosophy which we are here to stand up for within the European Parliament. But we have these comitology debates with regard to most of the European Union’s financial programmes and instruments. I would say that in my opinion – and the experiences we have had in the past tend to show this – that reconciling opinions on comitology is rather easier than reconciling opinions on the budget. Let me point out that Parliament is asking for 850 million ecus in appropriations, not a vast sum in the Community budget, and that the current proposals are for 613 million ecus. I feel, at any rate, that for the ultimate application of LIFE, at least, there would be some way for the Union to make a significant budgetary gesture in favour of the environment. Let me conclude with the matter of our institutions’ way of working. This is the essence of how I understand the situation: we are being told that it is essential for us to reach a conclusion quickly, that, basically, the Members of Parliament should drop their claims, particularly claims on the budget, for if we do not soon, in line with the codecision procedure, get around to establishing the framework of the regulations for LIFE, then its implementation for the year 2000 is going to suffer a delay, and in the meantime the NGOs and the operators at grass roots level are waiting for our appropriations. I would, however, like to point out that the Council has plenty of time to formulate its ideas and that it is submitting its proposals to us only a few months before the fateful date. As for us, we our bound by the terms of the texts: a maximum of four months. We meet our deadlines and afterwards we are told that we should hold on and that in order to be reasonable we must go along with the position of the others, because in the codecision procedure there is just not enough time. I think Parliament often protests about this method, not to point the finger at any specific party within the Council, and I certainly would not want the Portuguese Presidency to feel responsible for this state of affairs, since, the truth is, it is something of a tradition, which the Council has kept going for a long time. But I should like to stress the fact that, on this issue of the environment, the budget issue is a central one and Parliament cannot yield to the blackmail which requires it to be the only reasonable party in the deal. I therefore hope, firstly, that our fellow Members will support us in the conciliation – but votes on this area are always very much in agreement – but also that the Council and the Commission will manage to listen to us and that we shall each take a step towards the other.

Political group: PSE