Mr President, I do not want to go over what everybody has said but just to pick out one or two pertinent points. There are those Members who have expressed their regret - Mr Titley was one and Mrs Peijs was another - about not having achieved everything they set out to get. Well, as I said at the beginning you cannot please all the people all of the time. However, I believe on balance that we have a decent budget and that is the best we can hope for.
There are those who are still concerned about the freezing of the structural funds. Mr Pronk made a good comment when he said that it is not just a worry for the southern countries but also for the northern countries. Let me say now that I represent a region which contains Objectives 1, 2 and 5b areas and which uses Objectives 3 and 4 funds. So if anyone has anything to fear it is me. I believe that the strategy we have used has already been successful and will not jeopardize the structural funds next year. I hope Members can follow my line on that.
I was quite excessive in my praise of our own secretariat and while I must be careful here and not praise the Commission too much, I have to be honest and say that our working relationship with DG 19 has been very good. It is only right to give it praise for the hard work it has done and the compromises with Parliament that it has tried to find.
Mr Schmidhuber mentioned one or two things. He referred to the small margins in Categories 2 and 4. He said he hoped for more after the revision. So do I. It is one of the things which I will promise the Commissioner. As we said in the inter-institutional agreement, we are duty bound to leave a decent margin in Categories 3 and 4. He also commented on the reserves, saying that we need an efficient budget and that the reserves could cause problems. We know they can cause problems. That is why we put the money in reserve. I think you will find that this year's budget is relatively easy as far as reserves go, compared to what you may get for 1996. I am looking at Mr Elles who will be the rapporteur for the 1996 budget.
On the MEDA programme, the Commissioner is perfectly right. The intention was that the funds that would have been in INTERREG were to be used for MEDA. The way it reads now in that amendment, it actually looks as though this is another Community initiative. It is probably too late to do it now but the Commissioner can rest assured that we will come back to it in the second reading and can correct it then.
Finally, to all the rapporteurs who have spoken, I should like to say that it is okay at this point setting a budget. What we have to do throughout next year is to monitor that budget vigilantly. We have to make sure that the things we see as our priorities are being carried out as our priorities. We have a duty to the people who elected us - the taxpayers of Europe. We do not want to see waste. We do not want to see inefficiency. It is our job and it is the duty of every committee to make sure that they monitor the budget where it relates to their area of responsibility. Working together with the Commission, I hope we will be able to get a budget that will be used to its fullest, that will be to the benefit of the people we represent, and I am convinced that come December we will have a good budget. Having said that, the onus will then be on Parliament to make sure it does its job in budgetary control.
