Chairman of the Committee on Budgets. – Mr President, can I first of all thank the President-in-Office for his opening remarks and especially his remarks about the good working relationship that we have had between the Parliament and the Council. It is fair to say that relationship has been open and honest and we have tried to get agreements where we can. I thank the French Presidency and the staff of the French permanent representation in Brussels. I can give good examples. When we had the ad hoc procedures, items were taken on board like the extra milk for schools, 18 million out of the EUR 94 billion budget. It was small items like that which we actually got some agreement on. There was a consensus on the new employment initiative which we are all looking for and there were items like the Fisheries Agreement which we could talk through quite sensibly. That is the positive side. Of course there is a downside, even in our good working relationship. The downside starts with the things I said before we had the conciliation, during the conciliation and now after Council has voted and produced its draft budget. We are disappointed at the attitude of the Council and its unwillingness to discuss the revision of the Financial Perspective. As far as we are concerned, the Interinstitutional Agreement and Article 20 stipulate that once the Commission had made that proposal, our two institutions were duty bound to actually discuss that proposal. We were told in no uncertain terms that no way would it be discussed. I will say what I said at the conciliation. The Council's attitude was 'hell will freeze over before we will discuss a revision of the Financial Perspective with Parliament'. I will reiterate another thing I said: Parliament is not a bit part player in this process, it has a valid role to play. Having said that, we take it as read now that there will be no revision because of what the Council has produced and also because we for our part want to be sensible about this whole process even though there may be no revision. That still leaves us options and decisions to be taken over the coming weeks. The biggest disappointment was on category 4 and especially the western Balkans. Parliament has sent a special delegation to Kosovo to look at its needs. We have spoken to all the major actors and organisations. We have had a hearing and the figure that we come up with is EUR 814 million for the western Balkans for next year. I say that with reservations because I am assuming this is the figure that we will come up with. According to all the colleagues that I have spoken to it is the same figure that the Commission has. Forget the figure of EUR 5.5 billion, we are not talking about that, we are talking about next year. Yet the Council comes up with a figure of EUR 614 million and if we look at the explanatory memorandum from the Council that is the figure in the light of the international financial institutions' estimates. That is funny because we have consulted the same international financial institutions and we get a different figure. The reality is it is guesswork on your part. It is a matter of fitting things under the ceiling rather than being objective in your approach to the western Balkans. I just wish the Council would be honest enough to say: we think the western Balkans is becoming a black hole into which we are pouring too much money. I just wish you would be honest enough to say: look we think it has to be reduced because we do not think it is achieving very much. We have a situation where foreign ministers are saying one thing and finance ministers are saying another thing and that does not help anyone. The Council needs to get its act together on this issue. It still leaves us with the problem of what we have to do at first reading. The Council also says that it wants to reduce payments, which is understandable. The ideal position for the Council is to have no payments whatsoever, but you have some obligations in this matter. Our worry is what happens to the backlog? It has to be paid some time. Thankfully, Mrs Haug, our rapporteur, will be doing an assessment of each individual line to get some idea of needs, but we still have a situation where although you want to reduce payments the Cohesion Fund is actually increased and again the explanatory memorandum gives no reason for that. No reason is needed because we know why – it is about horse-trading within the Council. In a normal horse-trading situation you usually end up with a horse. Too often the Council ends up with a donkey and this is another occasion when you are going to end up with a donkey because the decisions you have taken have not been based on objective assessments but on horse-trading within the Council. On category 3, there are some weird and wonderful proposals, many of which I mentioned during the conciliation process, but there is one which appears once again in your wonderful document the explanatory memorandum, on line B3/309. I need to ask a question about this because I am confused. It says: 'It is to be increased by EUR 1.25 million for the Special World Olympic Games in 2003'. We are talking about the 2001 budget, but this is for the Special World Olympic Games in 2003. The disabled games are held a month after the normal Olympics, which means that they will take place in Athens sometime in October or November 2004. So what are the 2003 Special World Olympic Games and why are we putting them in the 2001 budget? Is this another matter of horse-trading? God forbid that it should be, but it may well be just another of those situations. Whilst we have been awaiting the amending letter from the Commission on its staffing needs, we see that the Council has reduced the Commission's administrative expenditure by EUR 25 million. That is on top of the EUR 14 million announced by the Commission after publication of the PDB. We now have a EUR 39 million cut. I thought that the Council was supposed to wait until we had received the letter of amendment before making any significant changes. We have a joint role in this matter. The letter of amendment is quite a significant document. We began discussing it yesterday in the Committee on Budgets. We will continue discussing it at 5.30 p.m. today, and those discussions will go on. It is a good document, there is no doubt about that, but a lot of questions still need to be answered, for instance on the early retirement scheme and not just where the Commission is concerned, because the proposals being made could well have a knock-on effect for other institutions. That is why, Mr President-in-Office, we need information from you as soon as possible about the attitude of the Council. I do not doubt for one minute that you will consider the matter carefully, as you have said, but we need to know how far the Council will be going along with the Commission proposals, especially when it comes to the early retirement scheme. Whilst we can agree or disagree with most of what the Commission is proposing, at the end of the day the Council has to bring forward the legislation for the early retirement scheme. So our two institutions need to sit down and talk this through. I would hate this to degenerate into a ping-pong battle between them. We need to agree on a real assessment of the Commission's needs. If we want the Commission to do the job which we are always asking it to do, then at least in the three institutions we need to be clear about what we are asking it to do and what staffing levels are required. As to what is next, we in Parliament need to make some hard decisions, not least on the letter of amendment and especially category IV. If we go along with what is proposed in the draft budget or indeed with the PDB, a lot of Parliament's favourite areas, be they NGOs, Asia, Latin America or whatever, will be affected. So our committees, which are voting at present, will be submitting their proposals as soon as they can and we will take the necessary decisions at the end of this month. But the plea I make to the Commission is to give us some early indication of what it is going to propose for the Notenboom procedure. That would help us tremendously. What is contained within the Notenboom procedure could actually relieve our plight next year. If you can front-load the areas of concern this year and we can carry over into next year or at least use this year, which will lighten the burden for next year, then a lot of our problems can be eased. I am sure that our institutions can come to a settlement along those lines, and then we will have a decent budget at the end of this year.

Political group: PSE