Strasbourg, 14/03/2005 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament has defined its spending priorities for 2006, by adopting on Wednesday, the report by Valdis Dombrovski (EPP-ED, Latvia) based on forecasts for next year.
The main political principles identified are: preparation of the next enlargement: according to the EP it is essential to adopt supplementary measures that enable enlargement for 2004 (with the 25 current members) to be completed efficiently. The EP expects the majority of the new personnel from the ten new mss are recruited in 2006. It is also calling for preparations for the next enlargement to be done in dynamic way (accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007); good use of funding: the EP is calling on the other EU institution to improve the quality of expenditure. It suggests that an information tool is devised, which will enable translators from all the institutions to share texts and amendments that have already been translated in order to economise and improve the quality of translations.
MEPs are said to be “concerned” by the slowness of recruitment procedures, particularly in the context of enlargement. They are therefore calling on the EP Secretariat to revise these procedures to make them more rapid. They point out that the absence of a single workplace incurs significant supplementary costs. The cost of the EP in three countries (Belgium, France, and Luxembourg) represents more than EUR 200 million every year; they underline. They also reiterate their appeal for a statute for MEPs' assistants.
The EP is putting a lot of emphasis on the urgent need to improve the work of MEPs and is calling on its Secretariat General to submit for 1 July 2005, a report consisting of proposals for improving information technology services for MEPs. The EP also considers that the increase in its responsibilities over legislation will require more resources for this central activity (more rooms equipped with electronic voting facilities for parliamentary committees, strengthening of committee secretariats, financial resources for committee experts' committees). The EP also underlines the need to have sufficient means for areas where political decisions require more financial commitments so that costs of EP delegations to meetings organised on its premises are covered. It is inviting the Bureau to present a provisional forecast of the costs linked to organising the parliamentary conference of the WTO and the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.