Parliament’s costly cast-offs

Date: 21/03/1996

The Council of Europe is bracing itself to receive a poisoned audio-visual chalice from the European Parliament.

It looks as if the Council's tiny but productive television unit will inherit masses of technical kit currently installed in the existing IPE 3 press building in Strasbourg.

The whole lot, worth an estimated 770,000 ecu, will be left behind when the Parliament moves into its new building still under construction across the river.

Apparently, this one-time state of the art equipment is to be replaced by state of the art equipment that is so state of the art that it is still at the design stage.

An expensive decision for the European taxpayer, but a nice little windfall for the Council of Europe? Not really. The cost of maintaining all this machinery is put at about 77,000 ecu a year - roughly double the Council's annual budget for its entire audio-visual production.

“If we had that kind of money,” muttered one Council official, “we'd use it to make television programmes, not just to keep a load of outdated equipment in working order.”