Linda McAvan, on behalf of the S&D Group.– Madam President, I would like to thank both the Vice-Presidents for being here tonight, and also the Council. I think it is a very important statement of intent that you are all here tonight to embrace the concept of the universal agenda of the SDGs. When you talk around the capitals of Europe, and indeed in this Parliament, to be honest, we get the impression that we are still talking of SDGs as a replacement for the MDGs. It is something about development policy, exactly what you said, Commissioner Timmermans, and we need to move away from that, we need to get this comprehensive agenda.

I was pleased with what the Presidency said about bringing the Member States together and their coordination. It would be useful to set it out for Parliament so that we know what the Member States and Council are going to do: that will be very important.

I have just got few specific questions for the Commission stemming from New York. We have seen progress and statisticians have done their job: they produced these statistics, these indicators. Is the Commission looking at those statistics now? Are you thinking how we can implement them and set some baselines across the Commission? How are we preparing for the first meeting of the high-level political forum which takes place in less than 2 months’ time? How will the Commission be represented? How will the Member States be represented? Will we speak with one voice in that forum? It would be useful for us to understand that.

We know that the development aspects will be covered by a new consensus on development. I am very pleased that Commissioner Timmermans has said that we will look at the 2020 strategy for the internal aspects. We must have a universal agenda and we must be coherent. We must not lose sight of important things such as financing for development, and the major conference this week in London about corruption.

We all know that there is money there if we can harness it for governments to invest in the interest of society and not to have it stashed away in bank accounts in places like Panama. So there are some very important coherent issues and I very much welcome what has been said tonight and the concept of agenda that the Commissioners have spoken about.