Mr President, I wish to begin by expressing my admiration for the rapporteur who has worked so hard to draw up and bring forward to this Parliament a very sensible and balanced budget. I must say that he deserves congratulations from all of us for that work.

As in previous years, the Committee on the Environment has not sought a large part of the Community budget to implement its work - despite being the largest single legislative committee in the Parliament. Nevertheless, we did receive an early disappointment in the way that the increases to our previous budget lines were not dealt with as fairly as we thought they should be by the Commission. But this has changed, given that we have had far better treatment by the Budgetary Committee.

However, we remain unhappy. We remain unhappy particularly because we have been unable to create a separate budget line for the PHARE and TACIS programmes; we feel far more work must be done if we are to see real environmental projects producing real benefits in Central and Eastern Europe, and that money must be allocated properly and, as the previous speaker said, monitored properly as well.

Equally, we continue to be appalled by the massive amounts of money spent on tobacco subsidies by the Community budget and the relatively small amount of money spent on programmes to combat cancer and cancer-causing agents within the European Union.

I cannot say that we are entirely happy with the budget. We certainly are pleased with some of the help we have received from the Budgetary Committee.

Mr President, you can be assured that we shall come back next year pressing our case even more strongly to the Commission to ensure that the work that needs to be done in the field of the environment is properly financed.