Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the ECSC Treaty will expire in June 2002. In other words, the year 2001 will see the last full annual budget, and will also form the background to the assessment of the Commission proposal and the proposal that we are in the process of submitting to Parliament. The Commission has proposed that the appropriations should be increased to EUR 190 million, as compared with EUR 176 million the previous year. This corresponds, or rather, comes very close to what Parliament proposed during the previous budgetary procedure, i.e. EUR 196 million. Therefore, we emphatically support this proposal, although we feel the breakdown of allocations could be better. We believe that changes are called for here, and would urge the Commission to look into this. It is the situation with regard to administrative expenditure that we are most concerned about. We suggest a cut in redeployment aid, aid for research and social aid, and I intend to be more specific here. In other words, we do not approve of cuts in the sphere of research. On the contrary, we feel that there should be increased efforts in research, particularly in view of the candidate countries. As a result of enlargement, coal production will double and there will be a significant increase in steel production, and we believe therefore, that we urgently need a modernisation and restructuring process. We must step up our efforts to this end, and we need research into environmentally sustainable technologies. We suggest that as soon as the ECSC Treaty has expired and the appropriations have been transferred into the EU budget, the candidate countries should be given the opportunity to participate in the coal and steel research financed by the Community, following the example of the SOCRATES and LEONARDO programmes. We believe this to be an important proposal, in terms of achieving environmentally sustainable, modernised steel and coal production in Europe, and also with respect to the financing of these areas and the conversion measures. Secondly, we want a review of the relationship between he social measures and the redeployment aid. The social measures were cut from EUR 31 million to EUR 29 million in the Council’s proposal. We cannot comprehend this. We believe that it is imperative for structural redeployment aid to be provided in this area. The level of employment has dropped from 15% to 5% since 1999, and it is vital that we respond to this. On the other hand, we do not believe that the redeployment aid can be cut. Its capacity has not been fully exploited in recent years. In 1999, for example, only half of the allocation was actually used. However, the Commission, in making this increase, wants to cover the whole period up to June 2002. This seems odd to us because there will still be an operational budget in the second part of 2002, and so we are calling for a review of the relationship between redeployment aid and social aid. In addition, we want there to be a review of the administrative expenditure. Parliament has been proposing cuts for a long time now. In view of the decline in ECSC activities, and the conversion, it is debatable as to whether we can really still justify having an administrative budget of this size. Another important point I would like to make is that once the Treaties have expired, we no longer want a separate regime for the ECSC, but feel that it should be integrated into the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. The Commission has echoed this proposal, and we are now prepared to support it. Maintaining a separate entity would entail extra costs without achieving any added value, and instead we should set up a specialised sub-committee operating under the framework of existing EU structures. Furthermore, we propose that Parliament should be kept informed on a regular basis. In a statement before Parliament in 1973, the Commission undertook to accept the binding nature of Parliament’s positions with regard to the ECSC. We expect this commitment to be transferred to the new structures.

Political group: Verts-ALE