Mr President, at last the Committee on Budgetary Control has decided to recommend granting discharge to the Commission. Throughout this procedure we have all been aware of the well-documented flaws in the accountancy system, which were first highlighted back in 1994. This has been of major concern to all the members of the committee. We cannot bury our heads in the sand, we have to face the problems head-on and this report does that. Mr Casaca has done a very good job. The reform of the accountancy system is essential. We have timetables, we have specifics about where the whole accounts reform process is going, but we must put this into a context. We are asking the Commission to introduce a system that not one country in the European Union has yet managed to accomplish, namely the introduction of a full accrual accounting system. We have to remember that context. We have demanded a lot of the Commission in this report, and European s have been leading the way in setting extremely stringent targets for the Commission to meet. As shown by the committee last week, nearly all the MEPs on the Committee on Budgetary Control have been responsive to the clear efforts made by the Commission to deliver our demands. The irony is that throughout this discharge procedure we have heard a lot of sound and fury from the right and the right-wing press, and yet all they could muster after all that was three measly votes in committee. Even people who represent parties such as the UK Independence Party, people such as Mr Camre and Mr Titford, who are vociferous in their criticism, could not be bothered to turn up for the vote. That shows that their objections are based on ideology, not on fact. That is something we have to bear in mind. The aim of most people in the Committee on Budgetary Control is to put proper controls in place. A couple of weeks ago we had to make a political judgement as to whether our support for the Commission would help or hinder future reform. We decided that postponing discharge would actually hold up the system. We are interested in delivery. Turning now to the Parliament discharge, we have to be very clear that we in Parliament cannot throw stones at the Commission and demand from them, for example, a certain level of transparency, if we are not willing to demand the same of ourselves. I would like to congratulate the Secretary-General and the President of the European Parliament on the way they have run the administration over the past three years. They pay full respect to financial regulation. It will be interesting to see how the decentralisation system works over the next year. But we cannot admonish the Commission for wasting taxpayers' money when we spend willy-nilly on things that are, frankly, a total waste of money. Every month thousands of parliamentary assistants and administrators leave Brussels to travel 400 miles to work here in Strasbourg. We have now established that travelling time alone wastes over 25 000 working days each year – EUR 3.9 million! Note must also be taken of how it discriminates against part-time workers, the majority of whom tend to be women. It is wholly unnecessary to use EUR 173 million each year in order to respect historical treaties. In the wider context, I have found that we spend over EUR 1 million on committee meetings held outside the seats of Parliament. We have also seen an increase in the amount of money spent on yellow weeks, that is, EUR 372 000. The right wing must listen. They are voting against all of these points about transparency within Parliament, and frankly they are a bunch of hypocrites!

Political group: PSE