Mr President, I would like, on behalf of the committee, to move at least one of the oral questions. First of all, I sympathise with the Commissioner's desire to get better implementation of European Union law. That is something which the committee as a whole is keen to see. I want to quote from an article in the United Kingdom Sunday Telegraph this last Sunday. The opening paragraph is 'The European Commission has told Britain that it will lose up to 200 million pounds in grants for poorer regions unless it implements European Union laws to protect birds and their habitats'. I would like to know if the Commission is making these threats and, if it is, whether it feels that it has an entitlement to do so. That is a question which my German colleagues who are moving the other question want to follow up. The Environment Committee is very interested in finding ways of incorporating environmental considerations into other policies. The question is: is this a constitutionally viable way of doing that? What we are exploring here tonight in this crowded House is the question of linkage. Linkage, in other words, using the threat of the withdrawal or withholding of funds to try to get better implementation of legislation in what may sometimes be a rather unconnected sector but in this case is quite a closely connected sector, is one that from time to time European Members of Parliament look at and then veer away from when they realise that it might affect the regions that they represent. That is something which we find reflected in the views not only of some of the German Members here tonight but also in some of my British colleagues. We need to ask to what extent the European Commission is prepared to use the provisions of Articles 12 and 41 of the general regulation on the structural funds to delay granting money where there is inadequate information on the impact of the projects which have applied for the money on the environment. At its worst, we want to avoid the possibility that the aims of the structural funds and the European Union's concern to protect its natural habitats may collide. For instance, you may want to build a motorway across one part of the European Union in order to spend structural fund money and bring jobs to that part of the Union, but should you not be careful if that motorway is being driven through what should have been designated a protected site by the national government? Such possibilities have arisen in the past, especially in relation to major infrastructure projects. We want to avoid that, but we believe that such collisions could result form the failure of the Member States to implement the habitats directive and the birds directive also, and in particular to submit to the Commission by as early as June 1995 a list of sites potentially of Community importance, either as hosting natural habitat types or representing the habitats of animal and plant species of Community importance. We must ask: without such information, how can the Commission be certain that structural fund projects, which are usually large, will not damage sites potentially of European Union-wide importance? Future generations will not forgive us if we allow irreplaceable habitats to be destroyed, whose preservation we actually voted for eight years ago when we adopted our report on the habitats directive and then again in 1997 with the changes to the annex of the directive. The fault lies with those Member States which have failed to observe the directive, and that includes my own. If doubt hangs over their entitlement to structural funds, that is the fault of national governments. That doubt has now fallen over the position of the United Kingdom and its entitlement to Structural Funds because the United Kingdom government has not fully implemented or complied with the provisions of the habitats directive. It is in the power of the United Kingdom government, the German government and other national governments to remove that threat by complying with the habitats and birds directive. In the United Kingdom, structural funding for counties such as Cornwall, which I represent and which has recently been granted Objective 1 status, faces a twin threat from government indolence on this directive and from government incompetence and meanness. Even if the European Commission uses its best efforts in the United Kingdom there is no guarantee that the scrooge-like United Kingdom Chancellor will find matching funding.

Political group: PPE-DE