Examination of Witness (Questions 112
-119)
THURSDAY 6 JULY 2000
MR PATRICK
CHILD
Chairman
112. Has any assessment been conducted of the
number of additional staff required by the Commission to effectively
and efficiently discharge all its responsibilities and to eliminate
the requirement for technical assistance offices?
(Mr Child) It is a process we are going
through at the moment. We are now looking one by one at all the
technical assistance offices and working out how many staff would
be required in-house to take over the same activities. As the
Commissioner said, it is not simply a question of bringing in
people who are working in technical assistance offices and converting
them into temporary Commission staff. It is a more sophisticated
process and should yield overall reductions in the number of staff.
There will be efficiency gains in bringing those staff in-house.
We should be clear that when we are talking about bringing staff
in-house we are not only talking about bringing them into headquarters
in Brussels. In fact, the majority would be staff that would be
put in our delegations in the field to help with the process of
de-concentration.
113. Do you have to have any authorisation to
move people from TAOs into direct employment?
(Mr Child) We do if we want to have them employed
in Brussels. We need then to have the budgetary authority to give
authorisation for the operational credits involved that today
are in part authorised to be used for technical assistance offices
to be used for this type of staff contract. Already we have that
authorisation for similar staff working in delegations. It is
not as though there is some fundamental new budgetary principle
being introduced but it is something where we will need to seek
the agreement of the budgetary authority later this year so that
we can start doing it in 2001.
114. Where are these TAOs based and can we have
a list of them?
(Mr Child) They are based partly in Brussels and partly
out in the beneficiary countries and partly in other Member States.
You can have a list of them.[4]
I have prepared it for you.
Ann Clwyd
115. Are they on a national quota in the same
way?
(Mr Child) No. They are bodies of various sorts. They
could be a consultant, they could be an NGO, they could be some
other sort of organisation who have a contract with the Commission
to execute certain aspects of project implementation. To give
you an example which I know well, a TACIS twinning project is
implemented basically by an office here in Brussels. They go round
to countries of the former Soviet Union identifying towns with
capacity to engage in twinning projects and then doing all the
paperwork involved with sending their experts to towns in the
Union and developing their experience there. I do have a list
of them. I fear it is in French and you will not be able to read
it too well.
Chairman: That is all right. The Clerk
of the Committee here is a good French speaker.
Mr Colman
116. Just following this particular point up,
is there a situation where nationals of a developing country are
ruled out from being TAOs? Do you have a situation where this
is untied in such a way to enable TAOs to be nationals of the
countries that are recipients of the aid?
(Mr Child) TAOs as such are usually organisations
or institutions rather than individuals. We have procurement rules
which flow from the legislation that the Council has agreed which
in general tie aid either to organisations from EU Member States
or from the beneficiary country or countries in the region covered
by a particular programme. We have a lot of sympathy with the
pressure that is building to have fully untied aid but there are
significant political obstacles in the Council to going as far
as perhaps we would like.
117. Could the list be annotated as to which
ones are based in recipient countries?
(Mr Child) We can do that. I am not sure it is so
clear from the list.
Mr Rowe
118. I would like to tease out a little bit
this argument about devolving to local offices. A formative moment
in my life was going to the EU office in India which was smarting
from the Bihar poultry project. I remember meeting the number
two there and she was responsible for some ludicrous number of
projects. First of all, should there have been so many relatively
small projects for which the EU was responsible, and secondly,
there seems to me to be a debate between saying why does the EU
have to manage its budget in India when there are Member States
who would be perfectly capable of doing that as a delegated responsibility,
and if you are going to simply say it would be much better for
the EU to manage them directly, is that not a very expensive way
of dealing with the management of EU aid?
(Mr Child) There are two questions there. Firstly,
are our delegations involved in too many, too small projects?
It is a general question: are we just involved in too many small
projects altogether? The answer is that there is a lot of sympathy,
particularly in the SCR, and you will be speaking to Mr Schueler
a bit later on, for the idea that many of our management problems
would be resolved or at least considerably simplified if we were
able to concentrate on a smaller number of larger projects or
a smaller number of larger transfers of money to other organisations
which could then do the detailed implementation on our behalf.
On the other hand there is very strong pressure and also strong
political priority in the Commission on the need to maintain a
relationship with the sorts of bodies that typically do small
projects. I am thinking of course of NGOs who really do not have
the capacity to handle much larger projects but with whom we need
to have a very close relationship and who do extremely valuable
and important work. That I think is where the brake on the process
of concentrating all the money in a smaller number of larger projects
comes. We will always have to find the right balance there. Then
there is the question of where are those projects better managed?
Is it better that they are done centrally in Brussels or handled
by the staff out in the field in delegations? A firm belief which
underlines the communication that we put forward is that actually
the more we can involve the local management in the day to day
decisions and monitoring of projects the more responsive they
will be to the needs and the more directly in touch they will
be with what they are trying to achieve. One of the biggest problems
we have at the moment, and the people you met in our delegation
in India must have been facing, is that too many decisions have
to be referred back to Brussels even for a minor modification
to the details of the contract.
119. Can you change that?
(Mr Child) We are hoping to change that and that is
one of the things in the reform. There are limits at the moment
to what we can do because of the overall financial regulation
which requires decisions to be taken by the Commission itself
on a certain number of financial issues. We are pushing for greater
devolved management so that we will be able to involve the staff
in taking more responsibility for the projects they manage. At
the same time we have to be careful that we are not giving them
too much responsibility or taking risks in terms of financial
management. There have to be enough of them and they have to have
the right training to be able to do the job effectively and in
a way which protects the Community's financial interests.
4 Not printed. A copy, in French, has been placed
in the Library. Back
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