153.

The main changes to Parliament’s organisational set-up and management summarised in the table below: Table 11 Summary of restructuring changes in Parliament’s Secretariat in 2012 DG Restructuring and modernisation DG PRES The Classified Information Unit was set up in January and is up and running. Its main task has been to draw up implementing measures, working closely with the Commission and Council, for handling classified documents. The Members’ Administration Unit was asked to provide the secretariat for the newly established Advisory Committee on the Conduct of Members. This includes follow-up work on the implementation of and adherence to the Code of Conduct for Commissioners and dealing with Members’ declarations of financial interests and requests. Internalisation of security duties continued. DG IPOL Focus was put on consolidating the new Directorate for Impact Assessment and European Added Value and the Economic Governance Support Unit, and training the new teams. In addition, the CRIM Special Committee’s ad hoc secretariat was put in place in April 2012. DG EXPO A new Directorate for Democracy Support was created, aiming to give more coherence to the EP’s activities in support of new and emerging democracies. This new Directorate was created in a budget-neutral manner through redeployment and it started its work on 1 April 2012. It includes the Election Observation Unit and the Office for the Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy (OPPD), which were already part of DG EXPO, the Unit for relations with Western Balkans parliaments, transferred from DG Presidency, and the newly-created Human Rights Actions Unit. Based on the decision of the Conference of Presidents on 13 September 2012, the enlarged mandate of the Democracy Support and Election Coordination Group covers political guidance and supervision of all activities of the new Directorate. DG COMM In September 2012 a restructuring of the services was carried out by means of redeployment of existing staff and posts, in order to align the operational structures with the operational priorities of the DG. Two new units were created and two existing ones moved : — a new ‘Horizontal and thematic’ unit was created within Directorate B, — the ‘Events’ unit in Directorate C was split in to two entities: the ‘Events and exhibitions’ unit and the ‘Information campaign’ unit, — the ‘House of European history’ unit was placed under the responsibility of Directorate C — Relations with Citizens, — the ‘Public Opinion Monitoring’ unit was placed under the responsibility of the Director General, — the European Union Visitors programme unit (EUVP) was placed under the responsibility of the Director General. DG INLO To meet the challenges and demands of a growing and ageing buildings stock, the Directorate for Infrastructure was split on 1 April 2012 into two separate directorates: one responsible for building project management (with the subsequent creation of a unit specifically for Strasbourg building projects) and the other for building management and maintenance. A Resources Directorate was also set up, in January 2012, for centrally handling issues relating to human resources, finance, procurement procedures, IT management and EMAS service. In this context, central support units were set up: a unit responsible for budgetary planning, monitoring and control, a unit responsible for contracts and procurement procedures in the DG, and a general coordination unit. In July 2012, in addition, a computing and IT services unit was set up. DG TRAD Following the creation of the new Resources Directorate, existing structures were reorganised and the new Directorate C now comprises four units, i.e. Human Resources Unit (HR Unit), Financial Resources Management and Controls Unit (FRMC Unit), Training and Traineeships Unit (TTU) and the Information Technology and IT Support Unit (ITS Unit). The objective of these changes was to ensure a harmonised approach to resource management throughout the DG and to align the structure to that in other DGs. In addition, a new Editing Unit was created, contributing to further efficiency improvements by increasing the quality of the source texts to be translated by all the language units. DG INTE The creation of a Resources Directorate took place at the beginning of 2012. Recruitment of staff to fill the various posts in the newly created units within the Directorate was almost completed by the end of the year. An E-learning Unit was created in August 2012 in the Directorate for Organisation and Planning, with the aim to maximise the provision of skilled interpreters in all working languages to support the efforts of the DG in the context of succession planning and recruitment. DG ITEC The setting up of the Resources Directorate in late 2011 led to the creation of four units within the directorate, whose heads were appointed in 2012. The units drew on existing resources without any staff increases. At its meeting of 2 July 2012, the Bureau decided to internalise a number of ICT activities carried out by external service providers. As a result of this budget-neutral measure, 60 permanent posts will be created in 2013 and 2014. The establishment of the Design and Development Unit in the middle of the year made it possible to improve planning, preliminary project assessment and IT programme management.