Mr President, I am delighted to present these two reports to you. I will deal with the easier one first, the eTEN programme, which the Commissioner has outlined with admirable clarity. I want to recommend to Parliament that it accept the Commission proposal. I was interested that the budget blood still runs in the Commissioner's veins. He was quite right to point out that this proposal is a reallocation of an existing budget and is not about raising the total budget. However, if the 10% ceiling is raised to 30%, it will mean the deployment of fewer but more focused projects in the future. The Commissioner again is quite right that when the potential for deployment of a product is recognised, the main barriers it faces are financial ones. There are difficulties which we well know in obtaining private capital for initial investment in this area. To raise the ceiling in this way is a proper use of funds in the eTEN budget programme. I hope that the Commission proposal is accepted and I have not tabled amendments, nor have other colleagues, which is the right thing to do. The IDA programme is more complicated. I had hoped that we would get a first-reading agreement on this but this proved not to be possible. In some ways, for very good reasons, the Council showed a good degree of diligence in its considerations of this proposal. What we are looking at here is extending the IDA successes in cross-border cooperation and communication between public administrations. This will build on that and also extend this cooperation to citizens and to businesses. However, there are also important changes which relate to the procedure, which has been streamlined and simplified. It is good that lessons have been learned from previous IDA work. The Commissioner knows that I was the rapporteur on two or three separate IDA proposals and I note with some wry humour that this was long before the phrase 'eGovernment' was widely used or even invented. However, the proposal can and will have real benefits. The Commission estimates that for every euro spent on IT infrastructure, the public sector can gain up to EUR 1.8. The annual cost of the TESTA programme, the part of IDA that deals with infrastructure, is EUR 4.6 million. The benefits are estimated to be EUR 8.6 million across the public sector: a genuine multiplier. The new programme will be called IDABC. I will read to you what it means because it is sometimes easy to forget: Interoperable Delivery of pan-European eGovernment Services to Public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens. Although it is a real mouthful, we can point to the IDA successes as bringing real benefits to European Union citizens in ways that really touch their lives. IDA is currently working in the following areas: agriculture, humanitarian aid, the internal market, statistics, environment, trade, employment and education. I pulled out here, and in my explanatory statement, five or six specific projects: the Solvit network, which provides a mechanism for people who come up against barriers to the internal market to raise the issue with the Member State concerned; the Euphin programme, which enables authorities to exchange data on public health issues, including communicable diseases in a fast and secure way; Ploteus, a portal that supplies information on learning opportunities around Europe; TourNet, a system for linking tourism administrations so that they can share information about their own particular areas; and finally Transcards, a more local and focused programme, which allows citizens living on the French-Belgian border to use the health facilities of either Member State, regardless of which country they live in. They are all good, quotable examples of tangible benefits the IDA way. This new proposal will bring not only tangible benefits in the IDA way, it will also bring benefits to European citizens and businesses. It will facilitate the free movement of people, goods and services by making eGovernment applications more accessible across national boundaries. I very much hope that Parliament supports the Commission proposal in the way that I have amended it and I commend it to you. Lastly, I should like to make a very brief comment on the report by my colleague, Mr Clegg. I will not go into the detail. He has done an excellent job here and is quite rightly using very specific language about some of the shortcomings of Member States. The Commissioner indicated his seriousness as regards addressing those Member States which did not meet the due deadlines: the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy made it clear that it would back him if he wanted to take the action he has outlined. I am confident that Parliament will also support him in this. We are already getting some indications that the accession countries are saying that they do not have enough time and need more breathing space. It is difficult to resist those arguments if existing Member States, which should be well able to transpose and implement, have not done so. I commend my own two reports, and that of Mr Clegg, to the House. (Applause)

Political group: PSE