Mr President, I too should like to congratulate all the rapporteurs, especially Mr McCartin, who has taken a reasonable amount of flak from me. I should also like to congratulate Mrs Morgan on her discharge report. I was not in the Chamber when she made her comments about ECOSOC, but I am sure she is now with me in calling for this organisation not only not to get discharge but actually to be disbanded because it is a waste of money. My primary job here on behalf of my group is to talk about the Staes and Seppänen discharges. This is very easy because they are two very good reports written by two very good parliamentarians. Regarding the McCartin report, I want to put on record, especially for people in the public gallery, some of the simple facts which we should be talking about. There is still no positive statement of assurance from the Court of Auditors. This is the seventh year running. There probably never will be one because they have got themselves into a very tight corner now. How can they give discharge to an organisation where 5% or more of the budget is lost through fraud, mismanagement or waste and 14% of the budget, at least, is running as a surplus? Nearly 20% of the budget is not spent correctly, as we would like it to be. This is not a record to be proud of. The discharge report by Mr McCartin contains a number of quite scathing points and highlights ongoing problems within the Commission. And yet Mr McCartin comes to the conclusion that he should recommend discharge. Quite correctly, he notes that the majority of the EU's budget is administered in the Member States. However this does not absolve the Commission of final responsibility and accountability. The buck stops with the Commission. It is its responsibility, as stated in Article 274, to implement and oversee the Community's budget. Once again this is a year in which it has failed to manage and control the Community's budget properly. My party's representatives in this House were elected on a whole host of pledges, the main one being to sort out the accounts of the European Commission and other European institutions and make sure that the reform process that most people in this House are pleased to see going forward is actually driven through and achieves results. As much money is now being lost through fraud and mismanagement of funds in the 2000 budget as when we made the pledge in 1999 to try and sort this out. John Wiggins, a former member of the European Court of Auditors, is quoted in a British newspaper saying that the situation in the Commission is unchanged. Things have got to change. The European Parliament's legal services wrote a note to the Budgetary Control Committee on 5 November 2001 giving an opinion on whether not granting discharge should lead to the fall of the Commission. It states that undoubtedly refusal to grant discharge is the expression of serious political sanctioning of the Commission. Its legal effect, however, is not such as to compel the Commission to resign. That is covered by a special procedure laid down in Article 141 of the EC Treaty. In voting not to give discharge to the Commission, we are actually making sure that the Commission knows firstly, that we do not want it to resign and, secondly, that we want it to sort the problems out. If nothing has changed by this time next year, if there is still no positive statement of assurance, if there is still 5% and more waste, mismanagement, fraud and disappearing money, and if there is still a huge budget surplus, then we will be getting to the stage where we will have to say to the people in the public gallery and the people who put us here that nothing has changed in the European Commission, the reform process is still ongoing – and is the slowest process ever – and we have failed in one of our core tasks which was to sort these problems out in the first place. That is not a record to be proud of and not something I am prepared to stand before my constituents and say.

Political group: PPE-DE