Mr President, let me also start by congratulating Mr Ferber on a comprehensive estimate of Parliament's revenue and expenditure. I support the thrust of this report, which is in line with the policy of budgetary rigour, because the major challenges that this Chamber needs to address are greater accountability and transparency which will involve embracing institutional reform with vigour; secondly, the forthcoming enlargement of the Union and thirdly, a drive towards improving efficiency through effective budgetary control and better use of resources. Our main priority has to be to explain to European citizens what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it. We must win the confidence of the European taxpayer and we can only do this by improving accountability through simplifying – not mystifying – the work of Parliament, by reducing jargon, by improving the process of approving legislation and improving the legislative machinery and by making a clear connection between what we do here and how it benefits the individual. We are going a long way towards achieving this transparency through the introduction of activity-based budgeting and the proposal we have in this report to put appropriations for political parties in separate budget lines will contribute significantly to achieving this. These virtues are all the more important as we move towards the challenge facing the EU at the moment of enlargement. We in the Socialist Group strongly believe that the European Parliament should be giving every encouragement to candidate countries in their preparation to joint the EU. I have the impression that there are those in this House who appear to be frustrating this process of enlargement by placing unnecessary obstacles in the way and often using spurious arguments to limit the preparation for enlargement: for example, the rejection of the proposal to fill the 35 vacant posts in the language reserve between 2001 and 2002. The reason given, and also outlined by my colleague Mr Elles, is that we believe that this will pre-empt discussions with accession states. Do we seriously believe that this small step will influence all the institutions as to which countries are in the first tranche and which are in the second tranche? Do we really believe that by committing less than half a per cent of Parliament's language budget the political decision will be made and taken out of our control? I am somewhat confused and if I recall correctly, the rapporteur agreed previously and argued vigorously for setting up an interinstitutional recruitment agency in his last report. What is the point of approving a joint operation whilst at the same time we are preventing any recruitment of people? I strongly favour planning properly for enlargement because experience has shown that there is a long lead-in time for the training of interpreters and translators. It is necessary if the admission of the new Member States into the Institution is to run smoothly from a language point of view. Of course I agree that we should not at any stage prejudice political decisions which have to be taken at a later date. On the other hand, we should avoid giving out discouraging messages to the applicant countries that are currently making great efforts to get themselves in shape to join the EU. I reiterate that we should not pre-empt any political decisions to be taken on enlargement. We need to plan and to be imaginative and to be creative as to how we prepare for enlargement because nothing will be more damaging to the EU if we make a bad job of enlargement. What we also need to do is have a vigorous implementation of reform to prepare for enlargement. Very recently the President of the European Court of Justice warned that it would be unable to cope with enlargement of the EU. The average time that it takes for a case to be heard has risen from 17 months in 1988 to 23 months last year. That is a very long wait. What we need to do is to have reforms, not just in the areas of staffing and procedures, but we also need to have a new approach in terms of buildings policy. It is vital that the preparations are made during the coming financial year to ensure that Parliament's buildings are able to accommodate new Member States of an enlarged EU. It is also important for provision to be made to set up information offices in the countries which have applied to join the EU. It is widely acknowledged that the systems that we have at the moment were set up for the EU when we only had 6 Members and they are creaking at the edges in terms of the Union of 15 Members. How are they possibly going to be effective with 25 Members? It is important that we plan and prepare. I am a relatively new Member of Parliament and while I see a lot of good work going on in the committees, I am acutely aware that as a result of the new responsibilities in the Treaty of Amsterdam there is a need not just for individual support for Members but also scientific support for committees. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam came into force Parliament's workload has increased very significantly and it is important that this is taken into account in this budget. The Commission's Work Programme now incorporates a very large number of codecision procedures and these procedures have significantly increased our workload. If we are to convince the people of the EU of the importance of the European Parliament's work and persuade them to take it more seriously, we need to improve our systems of working. That is why I welcome the report's emphasis on the common statute for Members and assistants and I hope that we can adopt this as soon as possible. I have been disappointed by some aspects of the report's focus. It focuses too much on the minutiae of detail in sometimes preventing administrative changes in staffing and frustrating strategic vision. I am concerned at the wisdom of putting 30% of the appropriation into the reserve for security services as the rapporteur proposes. There is a contradiction in the rapporteur's argument. He has always focused on outsourcing of Parliament's services. Here we have an example of outsourcing that is not working. Rather than reducing the budget we should be looking at how we improve security services, and the question we should be asking is: should we have our own security services or should we be retendering it rather than just reducing the budget? I am also disappointed that the report ignores one of the biggest inefficiencies we have. Members of the European Parliament are the only parliamentarians who have no say in the location of their seat. A seat on three sites is the most incredible waste of time, money, travel and transport. Surely, when we are looking at budgetary rigour we have the right to address this issue because until we do so the general public will be confused about what we are doing in so many places. It also confuses the roles of the organisation.

Political group: PSE