Our Group wanted an end to roaming charges by 2014, aligning them with domestic prices. As other groups blocked this, we proposed amendments to drastically reduce the price caps for calls, SMS and data. We also proposed that if the 'decoupling' measures didn't equalise domestic and roaming tariffs then the Commission should draft proposals for a single mobile communications market with no price differences for domestic and roaming use.

 

During the trilogues, our Group secured two major victories:

 

1) We negotiated vastly reduced prices for roaming calls, SMS and data. So consumers will pay 35% less (across the board) in 2012, 45% less in 2013 and 65% less in 2014. Data use will be reduced from an average of €3 in 2012 to just 20 cents per MB in summer 2014, just after the European Parliament elections.

 

2) We consistently argued that there is no real reason for roaming charges to exist, except to make profits for the big mobile phone companies. For the first time in EU law, we achieved a clear statement that the goal of roaming legislation is a common mobile market with no difference between national and roaming tariffs, and that if the 2016 review shows this hasn't happened then the Commission will submit a new proposal to achieve this.

The Arab Spring has given the EU a unique opportunity for renewed engagement with countries in the Southern Mediterranean. This report examines how the EU can live up to its promises following these changes and looks at greater commercial engagement balanced with human rights, democracy, sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.

 

In particular the report examines the Commission's 'more for more' concept which advocates that democratic reforms and individual freedoms should be mirrored by EU economic and trade liberalisation.

This dossier is the most difficult for negotiations with the other institutions. Once again the Council has declined to respond to written questions put by budget control committee members. These mostly focus on the transfers between budgets and whether funds intended for one purpose have been put to other uses. The Court of Auditors' report criticised the Council for diverting interpretation/translation funds into the Residence Palace project and the Council responded that it would cease this practice.

 

The Council has taken the view that approving the Commission budget (granting the discharge) has the effect of approving the entire budget as this is all that is specified in the Treaty. So although the Parliament refused approval to the Council for 2009, the Council claims that the May 2011 discharge for the 2009 Commission budget in effect also approved the Council budget. The Commission does not share this view and has said so.

 

The Parliament wants to have the various institutions named individually in the Financial Regulation negotiations to avoid this ambiguity in future and give Parliament a firm mandate for a separate discharge for each body. Inevitably, the Council is not willing to accept this clarification and we will have to see if progress can be made on this point in the political trilogues (9 May and 1 June).

 

Parliament scrutinises its own budget implementation and we want to get to the position where there is an equivalent process for the Council’s spending. Parliament’s services have provided the information required by the committee responsible, enabling it to take an informed decision about budget discharge. We want to be able to take a decision on the Council’s discharge in the same informed way.

The approval of the agencies' budgets (24 agencies) is governed by the Articles 146 and 147 of the Financial Regulation and Annex VI of the European Parliament's rules of procedure. The Parliament can decide to postpone its decision to approve budgets to the October two years after the budgetary year, but then the discharge must be either granted or refused.

 

The agencies are decentralised bodies of the European Union set up by an act of secondary legislation for very specific technical, scientific or managerial tasks. The agencies have vital importance in terms of delivering the goals of EU policies and represent less than 1% of the EU budget. The S&D supports the agencies as they help achieve crucial policies like making our food safer, our environment cleaner and our flights more secure. This is of clear benefit to EU citizens.

 

For the budgetary year 2010, the EPP rapporteur has taken a disproportionately critical line towards the agencies and also towards the European Court of Auditors. Much of the rapporteur's criticism is clearly unjustified and seems to be beyond the scope of the discharge procedure. The rapporteur argues that in times of a financial and economic crisis the agencies should make substantial savings but she seems to be using this as a pretext to pursue a truly eurosceptic agenda with a view to merge or close some of the agencies.

S&D rapporteur Inés Ayala Sender prepared a very detailed report on the Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC), outlining where the institution had made a number of improvements. 

 

ECOSOC has made good progress in improving its systems of payments to ECOSOC members for their attendance at sessions in Brussels. The report also praises the savings and efficiencies arising from the common services shared with the Committee of the Regions. We trust that the outstanding investigations will soon be concluded and that these matters will be fully clarified by the time of the next budget discharge exercise.

The main legal basis for the European Parliament as the sole discharge authority (responsible for approving EU budgets) is in Article 319 of the Treaty on Functioning of the European Union.

 

In its annual discharge report, the European Parliament considers the findings of the European Court of Auditors' Annual Report. Further activities include hearings with Commissioners responsible for the major EU budget areas, discussions with experts and fact-finding missions.

 

The main area the budget control committee focused on was cohesion policy where error rates increased from 5.5% in 2009 to 7.7% in 2010. Management of the EU budget for cohesion policy is shared between the European Commission and the member states, but the ultimate responsibility for the EU budget lies with the European Commission. The S&D Group recognises the challenges of sharing the management of the budget, but calls on both sides to work together to make their monitoring and control systems more effective and decrease the error rate in cohesion policy and other big spending areas of EU budget. 

 

The S&D shadow-rapporteur, Jens Geier, tabled a number of amendments proposing improvements in the control and audit mechanisms, and encouraging member states to take greater responsibility within the shared management structure. He also called on the European Commission and the European Court of Auditors to align their different error calculation methodologies (the Commission uses the 'residual error' methodology whereas the Court works with the 'most likely error rate' methodology).

S&D rapporteur Boguslaw Liberadzki focused the budget discharge report as much as possible on the budget implementation for 2010 (previous rapporteurs have tried to expand the scope of the report far beyond budget implementation for the year in question to include wider budget issues and call into question projects or initiatives agreed by the Bureau).

 

The report was widened in the committee vote to include stronger criticisms and considerable detail was added about the funding of the Parliament’s prizes over the last three years, along with calls for no further expansion. On the issue of EuroparlTV, we will seek to reverse an amendment adopted in the budget control committee to close down the scheme, and we will return to the rapporteur's original call for a cost-benefit analysis.