Amelia Andersdotter, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – Mr President, on behalf of the Greens/European Free Alliance, I would like wholeheartedly to concur with the statements just made by Mr Gerbrandy from the Liberal Group. It is, of course, entirely unacceptable that the President of Parliament withdraws a text from a report which was correctly voted on in committee. Having said that, I think we have also made some progress with the discharge reports, especially in the field of digital infrastructure, where we now have extensive texts for both the Commission and for Parliament recommending some better and more sturdy structures of procurement for the institutions for the future.

While the Commission has always been very good at producing recommendations against vendor lock-in and how to manage public procurement in the Member States, it is very clear that it is not able to follow its own recommendations regarding information and communication technologies. Therefore, Parliament is recommending that the Commission make smaller procurement contracts for ICT and carefully consider what kind of infrastructures democratic institutions need in order to transparently and securely communicate with their citizens. Also, speaking on behalf of the European Parliament, I am particularly happy that Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control promotes and supported an ICT security audit, which I hope will be taken by the administration as an opportunity to improve some of the network and information security problems that we have had.

We have also encouraged the administration of the European Parliament which has been at the forefront of some very successful projects like the AT4AM to collaborate further with the Secretary-General of the Commission in order to identify further improvements to be made in an open source and secure root to the base-level ICT infrastructures of the institutions. I hope that the Commission will find it in itself to endorse this opportunity to cooperate with Parliament and that we can all work towards a better and safer ICT environment.

(The speaker agreed to take a blue-card question under Rule 149(8))