chairman of the Committee on Budgets. – Mr President, President-in-Office and Commissioner Liikanen – nice to see you. Commissioner Schreyer did say that she would be unavailable and that you would be standing in. It is like old times. I bet you are really glad to be here. Thank you, President-in-Office, for your kind words, but to be honest with you, I was extremely disappointed with the outcome of your first reading and especially with the way the conciliation went. Maybe we were spoiled last year during the French Presidency, which at least made some concessions, but this year it was back to normal. For 12 years I have made the same speech – I did not do it last year – saying that this is a budget for the Council’s first reading made by Coreper and the politicians have no input into it. We try to get you to make political decisions, we put forward all our arguments and spend hours doing it (we have a very nice lunch in the meantime) and we get absolutely nowhere. It is a dialogue with the deaf. We talk and talk and we change absolutely nothing when it comes to the Council’s position. The difference between our two institutions is that we act as a Parliament should act. A Parliament should have a budget that reflects its political priorities. We do not spend money for the sake of spending money. We look at political priorities and then decide what should be allocated to them. What the Council wants to do is just keep expenditure to a bare minimum, no matter what the consequences or what it costs. We try to discuss issues like school milk. We made our point. Nothing happened. We spoke about the problems with the Structural Funds. Nothing happened. On the internal policies, the medicines’ agency and orphan medicines were one of the issues mentioned. At the SAB last year we had an agreement with the Council to increase the funding for orphan medicines and what do you do this year? You take 1.9 million off it. It just does not make sense. When we talk about trying to take Cyprus and Malta out of category 4 and put them where they should belong, you are not interested. And then when we talk about the compensation for not having a Morocco fisheries agreement, here is where we get into really serious discussion, because again nothing happened. We were trying to make the point that if you want to create some monies in category 2, you need our agreement, unless you want to take it from existing Structural Funds. Let us be clear about the money that is in category 4 for the Morocco fisheries agreement. It is in reserve. The only things we did agree at that conciliation were two bland statements, one on agriculture, one on category 5, but Parliament made a unilateral statement concerning the fisheries. I am going to remind you about one part, because when you spoke about looking at the letter of amendment and deciding what to do, in accordance with Annex IV of the IIA only the amounts entered in the budget for agreements, which have already been concluded by the Community, can be considered compulsory expenditure. Consequently, amounts entered in reserve – and that whacking big sum of EUR 125 million is in reserve – for agreements which have not been concluded, are considered to be non-compulsory. The Council might want to argue about that, but we do not see any argument. We will have the final say on what happens and rest assured it will not be a trade-off as to whether we keep that in or take it out to create the same amount of money in category 2. That is something that we need to be talking about. We need to be serious about this budget, to look at expenditure, especially in category 5. What are we going to do about administrative expenditure, especially in relation to enlargement? The statement about getting the secretaries-general to look at how the institutions can work together is all very well but there is a much greater issue. We actually suggested that the budgetary authority should have a value for money exercise looking at every European Union institution. You did not even respond to that. I just hope between now and our first reading, and indeed between now and your second reading, we can have some serious discussions and serious conciliation and at the end of it some serious agreements to get a budget that we can all be satisfied with. The one thing we will not stand accused of – I am not saying that you said this but many of your colleagues in the Council seem to think this – is that we just want to increase expenditure to the maximum so that we can finance the projects that we see as our favourites, while you want to be extremely prudent. We are extremely prudent. We are sensible in the way we handle things, but we want to do it as a team. We want to act as a budgetary authority, not going back to the old days where you voted on compulsory expenditure, we voted on non-compulsory and sometime in December we ended up with a budget. Let us hope that this year we can improve from what I consider to be not a good start to a far better understanding between our two institutions. If this Belgian Presidency is anything like the last Belgian Presidency when I did the 1994 budget, I will be extremely happy.

Political group: PSE