Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs Ordinary meeting
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ECON European Parliament
Follow its sittingsClaire Fita
It wants to make the EU budget a real tool for political transformation. I'd like to share a number of ideas with you. Firstly, this performance framework is not just about tracking expenditure, but rather to guide public action at the European level. And there, we should introduce coherent rules for the implementation of horizontal principles in line with the EU values. 35% of the European budget should go towards climate and environment.
We should improve budget tracking in terms of social targets, and we should strengthen the gender equality aspect. The implementation of this new framework, therefore, means real progress in terms of readability and coherence. But in order for this tool to be credible, it needs to live up to our ambitions and its design. Our first ambition is the social dimension. The social dimension is vital, and it should be clearly strengthened.
For my political group, the European budget must have fully contributed to the European pillar of social rights in order to be consistent with our values, that would involve including social conditionality and fiscal conditionality in the framework. Another important point, territorial cohesion. We must involve the territorial aspect. These regional partners need to be involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of programs and activities because the performance of the European budget is not only measured by Brussels, but it should also be measured there in our regions on the ground. And then finally, the DNSH principle, the do no significant harm principle, aiming to protect environmental objectives.
I want to be clear. This is already in political agreements. Rapporteur, I want to remind that Simplification should therefore in no way undermine this horizontal principle. It's vital to ensure environmental consistency in our policies and to ensure the credibility of our environmental commitments. That's what my political group defends.
Thank you.
Aurore Lalucq
I will now give the floor to Maria Pabon for the PFE. I'm gonna speak in Spanish. Thank.
Mireia Borrás Pabón
Thank you very much, madam chair. Budget expenditure performance framework. You would think that should be used for simple ends to work at whether citizens' money is really going towards improving their lives. But no, that's not what it's about. The commission is looking at something different.
It's a system to measure whether the budget meets their ideological targets. For example, the green deal, the social aspects, and gender equality. A farmer could lose subsidies not because they're producing their products worse, but rather because they are not meeting specific environmental standards set by Brussels. And while all of that's going on, we're not actually providing a response to the real issue. Is this money improving the lives of the citizens?
Is it improving competitiveness? And is it alleviating the fiscal burden that our citizens are shouldering? Rapporteur, I do recognize that serious improvements have been included in your report, but this doesn't go far enough. We want something much more basic and much more credible, a framework that would really track and evaluate the budget on the basis of technical standards, not on ideological labels. Because the European budget is not there to fund your ideological agendas on the basis of the rotating needs that you might have, but, really, it should go towards improving citizens' lives, addressing the issues that they have that are particularly in part caused by your legislation.
Bogdan Rzońca
Thank you so much, Madam President. Today, I am replacing madam Mariana Marlonk, and I will present her work, her position in Polish.
So ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I would like to thank the rapporteur for his work and for a very good line that he has taken, because he wants to limit the bureaucracy in terms of defense spending. And, also, he focused a lot on the do not significant harm principle. But we will think that it is necessary to go even further. Anything that concerns gender or climate should not be a priority in spending the European money. We have major challenges as the European Union, and one of them is, for example, competitiveness.
So we should really focus on economic objectives, and that can be done only once we leave the ideological issues like climate or gender aside. We will be presenting amendments that are important for the final beneficiaries and for the regions. Madam Malok is also convinced that there might be some attempts by some member states to blackmail other member states, and then there will be disagreements during the negotiations. So this is the reason for us to be flexible and to be sensitive to the individual needs of our member states. That's what we need.
We do not need ideological related performance indicators. Thank you.
Thank you. For renewal,
Ľudovít Ódor
Thank you. And thank you very much for the report. I would like to highlight a few issues. I really think that when spending EU money, we need to look at a broad set of objectives, which are, in my view, not ideological. It's just a fact of life that we need to combine together the economic, green, digital, and social transformation in Europe because we are facing a lot of challenges given the aging of the population, given the new technologies or the green transition.
So from this perspective, we need a balanced approach. And I tend to agree that competitiveness should also be emphasized very much in the horizontal objectives, but that does not mean that we should forego all the other aspects which are very relevant for the European economy. I have three points. The first one where I do not agree with the reporter is that we really need to remove the do no significant harm principle. In my view, also, if you look at, for example, the Draghi report, it states quite clearly that negative carbon effects are a core competitiveness concern for the EU from a long-term perspective.
Therefore, scraping this principle from the very framework that governs EU spending is tracked and justified is inconsistent with a broader set of economic objectives. My second point is slight concern over the elimination of the commission's delegated powers because sometimes what we really need is a quick and more flexible tool to react, and these powers were precisely designed to allow the framework to adapt over time, adjusting climate and environment spending targets, updating the list of gender equality programs and managing the single gateway. So, from this perspective, the flexibility is welcomed. And my last point is that we really do welcome the Econopinion's retention of the single gateway for transparency, along with the other positive elements carried over from the commission's original proposal. So once again, I wanted to thank the rapporteur and look forward to the cooperation.
Thank you very much.
Rasmus Andresen
Thank you so much, and thanks to Janusz Lewandowski for the draft opinion. But I also have to echo a bit what was already mentioned by colleague Odo. First of all, looking into what the role of the performance regulation for the next MFF will be, it basically takes over a lot of important stuff which is in the financial regulation right now. But by accepting the performance regulation, and that's what I understand we are doing also with the draft report voted with a very tight margin last week in the plenary, I think we also are already accepting that there will be a performance regulation, meaning that we should ensure that in the performance regulation, different questions are addressed. And for us, also, we were a bit, I don't want to say shocked, but let's say surprised that most of the references, even all references to the do no significant harm principle, are taken out, like in the draft opinion our representative presented.
And for the Greens, I have to say that this is not something we can accept. So if you want to have us on board, if you want to have the broad majority in the committee for this opinion, then this needs to be changed. And secondly, on the social conditionalities, we also will table some amendments ensuring that there will be some social conditionality in the performance regulation. And I also think that from the perspective of the Econ Committee, this is also what we should do. And also already mentioned by Ludwig Odoam, the reference to the delegated acts.
Also here, we would like to see some changes before we finally can support the draft opinion here in the committee. I want to be very clear about that. We could see that last week also, because the four pro-European groups voted the resolution. It's still got a majority, but looking into that, we also need to have a broad majority to end up with a strong position of the parliament also on the different legislations following the interim report. We need to see some major changes for the draft opinion.
Knowing the repertoire very well, also from the work in the budget committee, I still think we can agree on some compromises there. But as it stands now, there is still a long way to go.
Fabio De Masi
The union by two large trends currently. First of all, we have an increased proportion of funds that are allocated by financial intermediaries. And of course, they take a cut of the budget. They have a very opaque fee structure, very often. And secondly, we spent an increasing proportion of the budget at the moment, and we know that this runs a great risk of oligopolistic pricing power by the military industrial complex.
This is why I propose that the opinion should also include a budget benchmarking tool where the commission, which already collects a host of data, collects data on comparable prices from union-funded operations, from comparable public procurements, or also from third-party operations. I share the aim to reduce administrative burden and bureaucracy, but we should not reduce bureaucracy where it is needed to have comparable pricing data, so that we don't overspend and we don't serve merely private oligopolistic interests.
Aurore Lalucq
Thank you. No more requests for the floor, so I give the floor back to Zara Barta.
Janusz Lewandowski
Thank you, Shadows, for your comments. My door is open to you for improving this regulation. For some reasons, this is not so easy for me to criticize commission, but really, the regulation, there are some colleagues of mine in my group that are ready to reject this performance regulation, and not only to improve, but I think it may be improved via dialogue with shadows present today in this crowded room. Thank you.
Aurore Lalucq
Thank you. And the deadline for amendment is today at noon, and the vote in Econ is scheduled for June 23. So thank you to all of you. And now we people are waiting for us in another room for the Econ envy joint committee. And I think we will start in ten minutes.
Okay? So, see no? At 11:40. At 11:40. Yeah.
With a ten minutes delay. Okay. At 11:40.
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