Mr President, I would like to raise two amendments that were tabled by the Group but rejected in committee, which we have retabled for the plenary. The first has been mentioned several times already today, and that is contributions to European political parties. Here most of the items our group wanted were included in the final version of the paragraph, except that there is a reserve against the whole amount. We want to see that reserve lifted. We would point out that far from there allegedly being no code of conduct, there will certainly be measures to secure separation between types of expenditure – between information and political expenditure – and a code of conduct on the use of appropriations entered under this heading. We want to see that reserve lifted. It is evident that there will be no spending before June of next year, that is until after the elections take place. And we should trust in the good faith of people in the political parties in the European Parliament. The second item is the very small item of EUR 37 000, which relates to the creation of an A7 post in the Commission office in Washington. Again this afternoon we have heard several speakers who really are not particularly in favour of good relations between the European Parliament and the US Administration. This small investment will pay off extremely handsomely in terms of two-way cooperation and understanding, and I would urge that the majority of only one vote in committee should be overturned by a successful vote in plenary. The third point is not contentious. I urge the Group, as shadow rapporteur on the Gill report, to support the amendment tabled by Mr Walter, on behalf of the Socialist Group. This relates to the need for the verbatim proceedings to be looked at carefully again. First of all, I applaud the very speedy and accurate work done by Parliament's staff in producing verbatim versions of speeches in this Chamber. These are translated into the main languages within a few days, but it is unrealistic to expect that full verbatim translations should be produced in all the languages of the enlarged European Union. We need to achieve better value for money and to tailor the scarce interpretation and translation skills to best advantage. Individual requests, as called for in the amendment for particular needs, must surely be the way forward. The European Union needs to use the latest technology available to meet these needs. I appreciate that there will have to be an authorisation and monitoring system, but this will show the real needs of people and deliver the flexibility we should aim for. In this way we will be responding to the wishes of European citizens, instead of producing mountains of paperwork that destroy forests and also stand the chance of not being read. My final two points are again on the language items, firstly regarding full controlled multilingualism. In Amendment No 4 we are calling for the adoption of specific measures by the Bureau and 'the evaluation of the report by the Committee on Budgets on the basis of a working document drafted by its rapporteur'. This is a very important matter. It would involve the Language Centre in Luxembourg and a greater focus on teleworking. My final point concerns taking account of the extended multilingualism of the new Parliament. We need to make sure that we have proper, concrete measures introduced to help the accession countries find their way around more easily than we were able to a few years ago.

Political group: PPE-DE