Mr President, although we are approaching twelve o’clock we hope that this final report on development policy – which we are also trying to include within the reform – is not being treated as any less important, despite the fact that it is indeed the last report. I wish firstly to thank Commissioner Nielson for being here and for putting his commitment to this Parliament before certain other important engagements. The report by the Committee on Development and Cooperation, for which I am rapporteur, deals with the repercussions of the Commission reform on the effectiveness of relations between the European Union and developing countries. It is an initiative report, because the Commission has not seen fit to consult us in any other more official way, despite the fact that it has done so with regard to other aspects of the reform. At least as important as those which we have just debated is the issue of the RELEX reform, which is the one that will offer the world an idea of the scope of the changes in the Commission. On the basis of the Commission’s own diagnosis of the ineffectiveness of Community development policy, this report reaches different conclusions on how to remedy it. In our opinion, that is, the opinion of the Socialist Group and that of the whole of the Development Committee, the development policy is an essential policy within the framework of Community external action, which must respond to the problems of today’s world, of which the greatest and most dramatic is underdevelopment. This is an essential policy whose method of implementation must be modified in order to achieve the objective of eradicating poverty. These are the basic principles that we share with the Commission. Nevertheless, we believe that it has not been correct in its approach to the reform. The Commission maintains a division – albeit a somewhat blurred one – between political responsibility and executive competence, which past experience leads us to believe, will not work very well in practice. We believe that a cosmetic reform makes no sense in these times of profound change. Commissioner, surely you and your staff have asked yourselves the same questions as I have: Why not unify the cycle of cooperation? Why not allocate the competences for development in the developing countries to the Commissioner with responsibility for that area? It sounds absurd, but in fact what the Commission is proposing is absurd: that you take charge of implementing measures designed by others for certain countries considered to be developing, and of designing and implementing policies for the ACP countries. Reason and experience lead us in a different direction. Perhaps the direction we propose in this report, which does not question the division of competences in the College of Commissioners, simply applies it. The Commissioner for Development should have competence for development; the Commissioner for External Relations should have competence for political relations, and so on and so forth. We fear that the origin of the absurdity lies in the internal debate within the Commission regarding who is who. The problem is that the consequences of this will harm the effectiveness of development policy and, what is even more serious, those people who should be benefiting from it. We will see this next year when we are presented with the assessment we are asking for of the results of the reform. The assessment criteria will be the progress made in the eradication of poverty, in the complementarity of Member States’ policies, in the degree of coherence between Community policies, in the efficiency of project management, decision making and the simplification of procedures. These latter aspects particularly effect the NGOs. The NGOs, Commissioner, are one of the pillars of Community cooperation, providing added value for European development policy and great care must therefore be shown in taking them into account. The importance of the large multilateral organisations does not cancel out that of the small NGOs, and I am not going to expand on the role they play in development at local level because we are all aware of it, especially those populations that benefit from their action. We consider it to be essential that the hitherto fragile dialogue between the Commission and the committee for liaison with development NGOs be consolidated. We wish Commissioner Nielson the greatest success. We ask Commissioner Patten for the greatest generosity for the sake of the effectiveness of development policy, to which we are all committed and whose consequences are immeasurable in political and human terms, in both a positive and a negative sense. We demand from Commissioner Kinnock, who has just left, the greatest transparency in the management of the reform and the necessary efforts in the field of human resources. And we will call all of them to account. We remind the Member States that there is no place in European construction for temptations to renationalise; on the contrary, it is time to defend the European dimension of this policy by contributing to its rationalisation. Complementarity is one of the key elements for the success of the Community development policy and there should not be theological debate like the one in which subsidiarity has become bogged down. (The President urged the speaker to bring her speech to a close) Mr President, I will conclude by saying that we are going to approve two amendments and another three will not be approved, as has been discussed in committee.

Political group: PSE