Mr President, the Group has always been quite critical in the past of the somewhat incoherent and arbitrary nature of previous annual programmes. We have always looked for two things in this programme: firstly, a clear idea of the political direction reflected in the strategic choices taken by the European Commission, and secondly, a political debate between the institutions themselves. There has certainly been some progress on those two counts this year, compared to previous years. We wish to thank the Commission for keeping to the format and timetable of the new arrangements and certainly thank the college for being present in such great numbers here today. However, as President Prodi himself said, there is still some room for improvement. The Group would like to highlight three areas where we feel there should be further improvement. The European Commission aspires to be an EU government of sorts. Good governments make strategic choices. They set political priorities. That importantly means they explain what they are not going to do as well as what they are going to do. The concern we have is that, even in this improved document, the three priorities are so broad and open-ended that they do not really represent any meaningful political choice. This is reflected in the annexes. The annex covering the actions undertaken under the three priorities run to around 40 pages. More worryingly, the annex covering the issues which fall outside the priorities runs to 50 pages. In other words, we are faced with the prospect that the majority of the initiatives undertaken on the basis of this annual programme next year will actually fall outside the political orientation set in the annual programme altogether. That is simply not the way to proceed. Once again this resorts to a sort of laundry list approach to legislative initiative and we as a group would like to see a much greater display of choice and political orientation as regards what the European Commission proposes to do from one year to the next. The second point is the level of detail provided for each proposed legislative action. This has certainly improved compared with previous years but that was not difficult. It is still not sufficient and I would like to draw the Commission's attention to the fact that in the Convention there are proposals being floated to involve national parliaments in this debate in future. This annex is almost incomprehensible to MEPs so it would be utterly incomprehensible to MPs in national parliaments. It needs to be explained in clear, cogent, simple prose so that it is comprehensible to people living in the world that exists outside the institutions. Finally, the third point is our strong support for the Commission's stated intention of applying impact assessments to a number of pilot initiatives. We feel impact assessments are absolutely indispensable to improve the quality of European legislation but we would like to take it a step further in two important respects. Firstly, we do not feel that in the long run the Commission can be judge and jury on its own impact assessments – assessing its own draft proposals. We feel this should be done independently. Secondly, there is little point in the Commission conducting its impact assessments if parliamentary and Council amendments then escape impact assessments altogether. Therefore we would like to see an interinstitutional approach which applies impact assessments at all points of the legislative cycle.

Political group: ELDR