Mr President, I can represent Mr Pomés Ruiz, if you wish, and speak on his behalf. I should like first to thank the two rapporteurs, both Mr Μastorakis and Mr Pomés Ruiz, and congratulate them on their work and then make a number of comments on the two reports. As far as Mr Mastorakis’s report is concerned, I should like to comment on three points. First, on the fact, as stated in the report, that we cannot fall below 0.45% of GDP in future cohesion policy. As Commissioner Barnier has also pointed out in the past, Parliament considers that if Community funding falls below this point for cohesion policies, these policies, especially in view of enlargement, will cease to be reliable and efficient. My second comment concerns Objective 2, which will obviously have to be simplified so that actions have greater visibility and better results for citizens, which is why we prefer a new Objective 2 with thematic actions. And finally, a third comment to do with Mr Mastorakis’s report and Structural Fund procedures. They need to be simplified. It is becoming clear and I think it has also been understood by the Commission, which has from time to time organised seminars with local and regional authorities on the subject, especially in the run up to the new programming period, that we need to pool our thoughts as to how these actions can be made more efficient by simplifying them. Now to the report by Mr Pomés Ruiz on regions with a permanent structural disadvantage, such as island regions, mountain regions and the ultra-peripheral regions with low population density in the north. I should like first of all to welcome the recent development in the Constitutional Convention, which has extended the concept of economic and social cohesion by adding the term ‘territorial cohesion’. Hopefully, this added term will form an adequate legal basis so that we have something more specific and more tangible in the future for these areas. Nonetheless, Parliament feels there is still a need to clarify Article 158 of the Treaty on island areas. As you know, there is a division of opinion as to how this specific article should be translated. It is translated in different ways in different languages. It needs to be clarified once and for all so that the provision for island areas is valid. Parliament also feels that, over and above structural actions, the article referring to state aid, namely Article 87, also needs to be amended so that the areas we are talking about today are also included in the areas needing special treatment. Apart from all this, Mr President, Parliament – I think absolutely rightly – maintains in the report by Mr Pomés Ruiz that, within the framework of the new Objective 2, about which I have already spoken with reference to the report by Mr Mastorakis, a special thematic action is needed to cover these areas. Parliament also adds that, for these areas with a permanent geographical handicap, there can and should be a higher percentage of Community co-financing in future through the Structural Funds. Debates on these areas have been held in this Parliament for a great many years. The Commissioner recently ordered studies on the subject. It started with mountain areas and then moved on to island areas. I truly hope that today’s debate, and in particular the report by Mr Pomés Ruiz on structurally disadvantaged regions, really will give us the opportunity we have been seeking for years to change something and to send a message to the residents of these regions that we are taking a substantive approach to their problems, because these regions, as the Commission studies have, I think, demonstrated, are indeed at a permanent disadvantage by reason of their geographical position, which prevents them from enjoying the same competitive conditions as other regions in the European Union. The time has therefore come, Mr President, for action rather than words.

Political group: PPE-DE