 So let me now move to the next item of our agenda, which is the debate on the European Commission for 2021 Work Programme and the first EU Strategic Foresight Report. We have the opportunity to have with us Vice President Sevchowicz and a great friend of the Committee of the Regents. Dear Vice President, Dear Maros, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here at the European Committee of the Regents today. Our institution and its members are the Commission's strongest allies, not only because we represent the Democratic pillar of the Union, but also because we are its safety net and its best tool for reaching citizens. This is why we play a pivotal role in the Better Regulation Toolkit, and particularly welcome your decision to include not only our members in the field for future platforms, but also the COR's Rec Hub Network. We are fully committed to working to spot potential bottlenecks and achieve better legislation. We believe that only by fully implementing the recommendations on active subsidiarity we will be able to achieve inclusive governance in the Union. Fully exploiting unexplored margins within the current treaty framework alongside improved inter-institutional agreement on better law enforcement can make a world of difference. So in this regard, I would like to ask you to ensure the rollout of tailored public consultations for local and regional authorities. This could be a particularly useful way of ensuring that the voice of national and European associations is heard when analyzing the Commission's priorities in its work program. Our common aim must be to involve regions and cities in permanent dialogue with the aim of introducing new European legislation, new policies, only if and when it is really needed. I am also confident that we will work closely together on how to improve legislation during the Conference on the Future of Europe, a unique occasion to move forward a more inclusive union which is more in touch with its citizens. In October, we presented the first edition of our local and regional barometer which provides an analysis of the resilience capacity of our citizens regions in the context of the current health, social and economic crisis. And resilience is indeed the new compass for EU policies. In this respect, I welcome your foresight report which brightly focuses on resilience. Let me just stress one point. The EU cannot be more resilient without its cities and regions. I would therefore like to suggest that you apply a territorial approach when monitoring the green digital and socioeconomic dimensions of resilience. Regions and cities can help in the task of anticipating the future since they have proved their ability to anticipate and manage locally many societal changes, coming up with practical solutions on the ground. Take for example cities implementing and reaching goals in the fight against climate change, something they have achieved by localizing the SDGs. The success story of ESPO in Finland comes to mind. Or the example of regions cooperating cross borders on health related issues. A good example of this is the hospital built through the European grouping of territorial cooperation between Catalonia and Ossitan. Take the example of rural or disadvantaged areas which anticipated their needs for broadband with a view to tackling demographic challenges. I'm thinking of the mountainous areas of Thessaly in Greece. Or those communities which worked for many years on the integration of migrants from Altena in Germany to Sintra in Portugal or Merkel and Medellin in Belgium. So there is plenty of room for cooperation and I see a possible convergence between your foresight report and our barometer that we presented two months ago. The next step should therefore be working together. Cities regions and the networks working on resilience are ready to map the challenges and the territorial risks and they can promote projects which build resilience at the local and regional level. I hope that our barometer and our territorial impact assessments can be used to help include the territorial dimension in the analysis of green socioeconomic resilience. Regions and cities can anticipate new emerging challenges. These include the quality of democracy and the concept of well-being in our communities, something that goes well beyond GDP. So let's work in partnership and I'm definitely, I'm certain that we will develop together the most efficient and inclusive European policies for a better future. Dear Commissioner, it is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, dear President, dear Apostolos, dear members and very much appreciate your introduction when you covered the most important points but also extended your hand towards cooperation with the European Commission, with me and also with our foresight expert and the network we are currently. Building on first and foremost, I have to say that I'm delighted to be here. It's a pleasure to address yet again the Committee of Regions. My only apologies that I would need to leave around 1620 because as you know, you have impeccable timing for your committee session because this is indeed extremely crucial week. I would like our leaders to start the discussion on how to make sure that Europe would be climbing neutral by 2050, that we would have adequate financing for the next seven years, be it in the form of our next multi-annual financial framework or the next generation EU instruments, which will be crucial for the future. And I presume that Commission's President Ursula von der Leyen will debrief her colleagues, her peers about yesterday's discussion with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Of course, these are the last days of the 2020, which is very difficult year for everyone. So I'm sure that you understand that all of us are really using every single minute to deliver on what we promised we do for the European citizens and to complete our tasks. I think that when we look at 2020, it was the year full of challenges and one which really struck us with relentless force. And I don't think that there is any family in Europe which was not affected by COVID-19, be it from the perspective of health or economic downturn or social consequences, which unfortunately always fell off the economic downturn created by such an important crisis like that Europe was going through. What was very important was that we have seen in this crisis also new opportunities. And I think that strong, unbreakable unity of the European members showed so early on after the crisis started brought us, I would say, to the fringe, to the border of what might be the new chapter in European history. We are about to embark upon new era where we will have enormous financial means to kickstart of our economy. We are working very hard to be much stronger in the areas like health by building a health union so we can be better prepared for future pandemics. And we are also using force sites in new ways which allow us, like we announced for example today, to make sure that Europe would be technological leader not only today but also in the future because I had the pleasure today to present to the public our new European battery regulation which sets the new global golden standard for the most sustainable, the most performant and most socially responsible products which should be placed on the European market by the manufacturers I believe from around the world but especially from Europe. Of course for all that to happen we have to be successful not only in the summit but in our close cooperation and also in a way how we are going to make sure that local city and regional authorities are not only properly heard but properly involved in our decision making and it will be absolutely crucial in preparation of the recovery plans which the European Commission is currently discussing with all 27 member states. I would say that we are at different level of the preparedness if it comes from the country to the country. Some member states are progressing on sector by sector basis. Other governments decided to present the comprehensive recovery plan but what we are always highlighting and underlining is the importance that these recovery plans would have the societal support that they would be result of inclusive consultations, discussions where of course regional and local and city authorities should be always part of. As you know we would like to conclude our work with our member states on the recovery plans by March, April of the next year so we can quickly start to execute them and make sure that this next generation EU with 750 billion euros which would be channeled in the direction of kickstarting the post-COVID economy will be properly used and could be really channeled to our member states as quickly as possible. Our commission work programme for 2021 was also aimed to achieve these precise results. How to stay conformed with key priorities of the political guidelines of our presidents upon which we got the vote of confidence from the European Parliament but also how to react on the new lessons learned from COVID-19 crisis and prepared for the better. Therefore we put as a headline goal in our commission work programme for 2021 as a restoration of new vitality. That we have to move in the next year from the strategies to delivery and that we have to focus much more on the future proof solutions across the whole policy areas. And I know that you've been also debating our programmes in a greater detail and that you would have a vote on how you perceive the commission work programme for the next year. And I know that results of the vote would be known just after the conclusion of our discussion. And I really would like to thank you for your input, for your contribution which was very important for us. And even of course extremely pleased that they will great extent it's well corresponded with our main focal points for the next year. How to make sure that this twin digital and green transition would be further supported by strong strength and resilience of our economy. How to make sure that we will be acting in more fair global market conditions for our businesses and industries. And how it would increase our strategic autonomy and become less dependent on individual suppliers of goods or raw materials. And I think this we felt very clearly during the first months of the crisis in the case of medicines, medicaments and protective equipment for our health professionals. And of course Europe would continue to lead the world in tackling the climate change and making sure that we would be looking for closer and closer allies in that endeavour. And of course we have high hopes that the new American administrations will again rejoin our effort not only to implement the Paris Agreement, but to be very clear that we want to be climate neutral by mid centuries to leave the planet in much better state for the next generation as it is right now. And therefore we very much appreciate your July resolution which provided us with a comprehensive overview of identified priorities. And also we value a lot your 2020 barometer of regions and cities because it provides a wealth of information from the regional and local perspective. And also I think it reflected very well the pandemic and economic effects and consequences in different regions of Europe. Thank you very much. It was appreciated by our president Ursula von der Leyen who also intervened at the occasion when you've been presenting the results of the 2020 barometer. And I agree with you that it's excellent ground for our close cooperation in the field of foresight. This year we presented first ever strategic foresight report and I think it was very logically focused on resilience because this was the key conclusion from the first six months of this year that Europe shouldn't be only green and digital but also very resilient. And therefore we wanted to make sure that in the future which definitely will not be less disruptive we need to have better foresight where we would anticipate what might come to the explore the different possibilities, how to adjust our actions to these new challenges but more importantly and ultimately by acting in a collaborative manner because I think that action upon foresight makes the foresight strategic. Not only to know and foresee what happens but to take strategic action to make sure that we will take the best lessons from all the insights our foresight experts are bringing to our political table. And I think this was also very well highlighted in your annual regional and local barometer report which as I was referring to was very much welcomed by the European Commission. We've been looking at the resilience in our foresight report from the different perspective that until now so we've been really looking at Europe from as we call it for quadrants from the geopolitical perspective but also from the green digital and socio-economic aspects of the resilience. We wanted to highlight where we are vulnerable but also where we have capacities to act and what are the most important opportunities in these respects. And it was quite clear that we would need to focus even more of our analytical work on the future of jobs because we see that the shifts on the labour market are systemic. And they will only accelerate and we would need as well as low-tech but especially high-tech skills which would have to evolve over the time and we would have to provide adequate assistance to our citizens and to our workers to be well-equipped from the perspective of the skills, from the perspective of the knowledge to be up to these challenges which this new labour market is bringing to us. And therefore education and training would be one of the key priorities for the future. As I alluded at the beginning of my remarks today, we adopted the new European battery regulation. And that's just clear proof that how can we change the tide within a very short period of time. Three years ago Europe was not existent on the global battery map. Today we are the hot zone for the investments. Last year and this year the investments been three times and this year two times higher than in China. We clearly have become the number one destination for the investment into the sector. And as of 2025 we will be able to produce that many batteries which would completely cover the needs of European market and we would become exporters. We have investments, we have demand and we have right policy framework to do that. What is the missing element, what we hear from our industry and missing element is to have adequately trained people with the necessary skills and specializations. And I think this is just a kind of guiding principle which is opening up very often when we are talking about the future and the new technologies, how to prepare our workforce for these new challenges of the future. As you know dear apostles we are working very closely with the Committee of Regions also within our SBAS network. For those who don't know SBAS is the abbreviation for the European strategic policy analysis system where all the EU institutions are working on the foresight and the contribution from the Committee of Regions is always very much welcome and very important. If you allow me last two topics I would like to cover, one is the better regulation. Because there we have already established very practical cooperation with your Reg HAP which are the regional HAPs who are helping us a lot to look where we can cut further the red tape, how we can reduce the administrative burden, how can we be better in making sure that our regulation is efficient, is not burdensome and it's fine tuned also to the needs to the SMEs who are the backbone of the European economy. And we also listened carefully to your suggestions how to improve and update our heavy or say web portal which is revamp, renewed, more user friendly and I hope that it would also attract many more contributions from the stakeholders to tell us what they would like to see in these proposals we put up for the consultations or also what they don't like or what they think we should improve in the propositions which we are tabling for the public consultations. And as you know, we've been transforming our refit platform of the past to the new platform fit for future. I had the honor to launch it a couple of weeks ago and I'm very glad that we have three members, three representatives in a governmental group coming from the committee regions. These are very respected members, chairs of the three specialized commissions of the committee of regions and we are very pleased about the active participation. And the last word about how to evolve our citizens better into the discussions about the future. I can assure you that we in the commission are eagerly awaiting the start of the conference on future of Europe. I think that we are almost there. We just have to settle one particular issue and then we can start. Of course, I'm sure that because of pandemia until we would have proper vaccination rates, we will most probably start in this hybrid form and we'll be using digital and online means talk to our citizens, but I think that all of us are very eager for the physical contacts for the real meetings with our citizens and I'm sure that committee of the regions and all your members will be very eager to help us to meet the citizens to listen to the concerns, worries and the suggestions. So I am very much looking forward to that, but also to your questions and answers. And as I said, my only apology is that I would need to leave in 20 minutes. So thank you very much. So once again, the president for your kind invitation, your kind words at the beginning. And now I'm listening to your comments and remarks. Thank you very much, Vice President, for your remarks, very interesting remarks. And I think you really explained and described all of your targets and your vision, basically. Since you have to live in 20 minutes, I would suggest that I give the floor to our members for about 15 minutes in total. And then I give you the floor for your final reaction. Let's start with the political groups first. Olga Gebrevic for four minutes, but please be the quickest, the shortest possible in your statements, colleagues. Olga, you have the floor. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Dear Vice President, Sevkovic, on behalf of the EPP group, I would like to welcome you to our planning session. And thank you for very interesting intervention. One year since the start of the Foreign Commission, it is safe to say that it has been the most challenging beginning of the Commission mandate in the recent times. The Commission continues to play the crucial role in the coordinating response of the member state in the pandemic, as well as union recovery. At the same time, local and regional authorities have been at the frontline protecting EU citizens from the consequences of the pandemic. Next year will be a crucial in proving that right solutions for a resilient recovery and preparedness for the future. The 2021 work program sets the framework for the better to happen in a sufficient manner. The first EU strategic force page report which focuses on resilience is a new process which is welcomed and if implemented properly will be of added value for equality of EU policies. Similarly, we need to explain what we are doing for the citizens by taking them on board and taking on board their views. As part of this, it is now more important than ever to start the debate on the conference of the future of Europe. The issues raised during the last year can be only managed if everyone has their say. Dear Vice President, the crucial element for the success of all above will be an improved coordination and solidarity between all levels of government in the European Union. This will ensure proper implementation of new policies as well as coherent and efficient responses to the health crisis. In this respect, the contribution of regional and local authorities must be an integral part of design and implementation of resilience and recovery plans. This means nothing more and nothing less than the full application of active subsidarity and partnership principles. I would like to give you one example. The comprehensive plan for the European Health Union announced by President Forden Lyon as a response to the health crisis is essential in strengthening the capacities and preparedness of Member States health systems. Many regions in the EU, including my West Pomeranian region in Poland, have significant responsibilities in the field of public health such as management of the hospitalities and care facilities as well as the design of health prevention strategies. It is therefore essential to involve regional and local authorities in preparing of the European response to serious health threats, including cross-border threats. Possession of this knowledge in health care should not be overlooked. Local and regional authorities have the figures to highlight regional differences and inequalities. An example of this knowledge is the data and analysis provided in the CURs, annual, regional and local barometer. All of this above can contribute significantly to the strategic foresight to report on elements such as the analysis of health, vulnerabilities, social and economic dimension. Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, for your very interesting intervention. Thank you very much. I'll get the floor now to Karl Hans Lambert, please. The program of work of the Commission is marked by two major challenges. The health crisis, the fight against climate warming. The health issues are numerous and colossal. The trans-frontal dimension is extremely sensitive. In this regard, I particularly salute the initiatives announced by the Commission for the second semester of 2021. There is no question that the pandemic will bring back climate issues in the second round, neither in terms of priorities nor in terms of investment. For the socialist group, these two objectives must, however, not occult the social needs that take place or that exist elsewhere. For this reason, we fully support the initiatives of the Commission for the protection of the work of digital platforms and for a new action plan on the common ground of social rights. We also wish that the Commission will seize the opportunity of its initiative, the renovation wave, to give priority to affordable housing. We also call on our will to launch a reflection on a European reassurance regime or on the wage equality between men and women. On the other hand, as President of the network of subsidiarities, I would like to insist on the need for a permanent follow-up for the recommendations of the task force subsidiarity to which the Committee of the Regions actively contributed in 2018 and which had invented the notion of active subsidiarity. I would like to thank you very much for having associated the Committee of the Regions and its regional initiatives to the work of the platform Fit for Future. I would like to conclude with a few remarks on the subject of your report on the perspective. This approach concerns territorial collectivities in a double way. On the one hand, the action on the ground really needs a long-term perspective based on a deep analysis of future trends. On the other hand, the exercise of perspective gains a lot of inspiration from the concrete situations and issues on the ground. It is not a coincidence that the Committee of the Regions has been actively participating in the work of the Interinstitutional Space Group and has recently decided to strengthen its action capacity in terms of perspective. We cannot only rejoice at what the current Committee agrees on a particular importance to the theme of the perspective and consider it to be a real work instrument focused on resilience. As a pilot of this action, I wish you, Mr. President, a lot of success and perseverance needed to lead the experiment to the end. As mentioned in the last document on the 2030 trends, the perspective will never replace the future, but it helps us not to lose sight of our strategic objectives and not to make too many mistakes. Thank you for your attention. We have Siboku, the floor now to Politika Landregren for three minutes, please. I would also like to thank you for, when we saw you later, on the Fit for Future plenarium. I think we can develop a lot together. I would like to present some of our strategic thoughts in our regional development work in Sweden. All regional development plans work in the 2030 agenda with 17 global goals. It also means that the way we are going to work in order to achieve this is that we are now rising as clearly as possible. How can we create increased resilience? Our strategy is to build competence. We need to develop large parts of our population, not just our young people, to improve competence and a long-term learning. We need to increase the digital competence. In West Sweden, where we have a large food industry, we need to work both with knowledge about battery development, electrification, improved technical education, but also the green transformation. We need to work with the best innovation power for competitive life in the future, but also for sustainable growth. We are working on developing well-finished technology. I would like to give you an example called All Age Hub, where communities cooperate with the academy, the civil society, and work to develop requirements for innovation. A lot to our elderly people. In West Sweden, it is a sustainable, better-than-sufficiency with built-in collective trafficking and access to broadband for everyone who lives in everyday self-culturation. Working with this, which I believe is our great challenge, increases inclusion for a small group, a democracy development, and an integration, where the city and land is built, especially to increase the participation of the inhabitants, We need to work more with circular business models, and we need to experiment more and more to implement tests and allow the tests to be in the public sector. Thank you very much. Rob Youngman, please. Thank you, Chair, the Vice President, Sefkovic. Due to the lack of time, I will skip a part of my contribution. Climate change is an undeniable threat, and something needs to be done to address these issues. But who could have predicted that COVID-19 would also make a ruthless appearance in 2020 and in its path of destruction because one of the greatest economic fallouts the world has ever experienced? So my first question is, what should take precedence now when revenue losses of EU companies are estimated in the range of 13 to 24% of the EU GDP? Ensuring swift recovery from the pandemic that has inflicted hardship in every single EU region, or pushing through the costly climate laws that take centre stage in the Commission's Work Programme 2021? Speaking about better regulation, you mentioned it. It is high time for burden reduction at EU level and launching the one-in, one-out approach. My ECR political group has been calling for it for many years, and we feel that these calls have finally been listened to. People and businesses, but also local and regional authorities, must see that the EU is capable of not only adding regulations, but also relieving them from the administrative burden. To make this a reality, the one-in, one-out principle will need to be applied coherently in all policy domains and for all EU legislation. Can you therefore confirm, Vice President, that this is indeed the intention of the European Commission? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Kieran McCarthy, please. Thanks, Mr President. Dear Commissioner, thanks for your attendance. First of all, as an Irish citizen, thank you very much for your work on the withdrawal agreement in Northern Ireland this week. On behalf of the European Alliance, we are happy to see that the EU's strategic foresight agenda will address cross-cutting topics, and also the big topic of resilience, which I was very happy to hear you mention that word. Because too often, local and regional authorities are not involved or they don't get allocated the resources they need from their central governments. So I do think that the recovery fund is a golden opportunity, especially as local and regional authorities come under severe financial pressure from COVID. The recommendations of the Subsidiarity Task Force, which you worked on with us in the past two or three years, need to be continued to be pursued. And also best practice projects need to be pursued as well. So for example, urban mobility and future strategies around that topic could be a new case for a new approach on active Subsidiarity. One could tap the potential of the EU urban agenda and the expertise of their partnerships on better cooperation, better funding and better regulation. It is necessary to bring on board local and regional enterprise and the return of experience from local and regional authorities and how they prepare, deliver and implement key initiatives in our cities or regions or towns. And the CUR is working on fantastic flagships for next year and recovery and resilience facility, the facility held related COVID-19 responses, action plans for the implementation of the European pillar of social rights. And CUR for climate pact and the future cross-border cooperation, migration integration, the vision for rural areas, the topics go on. So let us grasp the opportunity by keeping working together more and learning and scaling up from our successful cooperation and multi-level governance partnerships that actually exist. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you very much, Mr. Commissar. It is a time of great challenge and several crises must be managed together. And from there, the approach is to make a strategic foresight, right and good. And we are not allowed to repeat the mistakes of the financial crisis ten years ago and take important steps and thus play a part in the transformation of the economy. We welcome it extraordinarily that the Commission and Mrs. von der Leyen begin to react in this way to keep the planet alive. Yes, and we must also go from the legacy of trade. The work program of the Commission for 2021 has been carried out by many ancestors of the European Green Deal as a growth strategy. And I would also like to point out that it is a big step from 40 to 55 percent reduction of greenhouse gases as a goal. It is a big challenge for all of us, but the Parliament has already decided at 60 percent. And the UN will still be aware this week that we have been in the Parisian targets at 3.1 degrees in 2050. I think that makes it clear that we have to act. And we need renewable energy ahead of time and fast. And we need that. And we have also written in our decision on the work program. We also need a gap that really is the goal of the Green Deals and also funds, more funds that the community and region directly have to offer in order to implement it faster. I would like to address a completely different topic now, that we also have in our decision on the work program of the Commission. And that is the minority policy. That is MSPI. That has to be implemented now. More than 1.3 million people in Europe have the support. And I think it would be good if the Commission could act actively. My time is running out here now. Thank you very much for being here and we support your work. Last but not least, our first Vice President, Vasco Cordero, please. Thank you, dear Vice President of the Commission. The Strategic Foresight Report aims to build collective intelligence in a structured manner to better chart the way forward for the twin green and digital transitions and to recover from disruption. I just quoted. To do this and to achieve better results, we have to set up a better way of working. How? Well, you've said it in your introduction and I quote, Local and regional authorities properly involved in policymaking, you said. I couldn't agree more. I come from the Azores, an outermost region of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic. In every corner of the Union, including the outermost regions, the COVID-19 crisis had a strong impact in all sectors. We, for the sake of results and for the sake of the people we serve, there is an unsurmountable and unaddressed need to make local and regional authorities part of the decision making process and to contribute to the solutions. We still feel left aside when it comes to EU policies. I ask you to support the way of working put forward by the former EU Commission, promoted with the Committee of the Regions within the Task Force on Subsidiarity in 2018, just like Carl Heinz Lombards and Kiran McCarthy pointed out. So, dear Vice President, let me finish this intervention by saying that this COVID crisis reminded us also how important social and economic vision are. The Portuguese presidency will put an emphasis on the social dimension of the EU. We should all strongly support that to achieve changes to improve our citizens' lives. The Committee of the Regions will play an active role in the conference ahead of the Social Summit in Portal in 2021, and we look forward to the action plan for the European Union of Social Rights. Thank you. Thank you, Vasco. Unfortunately, dear colleagues, since the Vice President needs to leave earlier than what was initially foreseen, I will ask you to send us all your inputs, and we will forward them to the Vice President. All of you who did not manage to speak, please send us your inputs and we will send them to the Vice President. So, Vice President Sefsovich, since you have to leave shortly, please I give you the floor for your final remarks. Thank you very much, dear President. I am really very sorry that today we are operating under such a time pressure, but I really would like to wholeheartedly thank all the members of the Committee of the Regions for the inputs, comments and also suggestions. On Mr. Geblewicz from Poland, he rightly pointed out that we should develop further our close cooperation on the foresight, and he was also making reference to the dashboards, which we really want to use as a tool for monitoring how we are building resilience across the board in our EU member states. And I'm sure that we can use a lot of data from your bottom-eater, and it would be very useful for making sure that this tool is precise, fine-tuned and useful for the future. On the Health Union, here I think we very clearly heard the calls coming from the European citizens that they want it to Europe more united, better coordinated and more efficient and action-driven if it comes to tackling pandemics. And I think that the clear demonstrations, how much we can do together is showing today where we have actually more vaccines than we need, and we are ready to share them with our neighbours, be it in western Bocas or to the east of our borders. And I know from the contacts with the health ministers that these negotiations with the producers, very often very crafty and assertive lawyers, wouldn't be very easy for smaller, medium-sized countries. Therefore, we want to strengthen our Health Union and make sure that we do it within the current treaties and that we would use the increased competencies and support for our agencies, be it for medicines or prevention of disease and establish new agency, HERA, which would be working on advanced biomedicine research to make sure that we would have good resources if another pandemic would appear on European shores. To dear Kyle Hines, to Mr Lambers, I just would like to say that it was a pleasure to work with you together for many years. We are, of course, very focused on developing further social pillars. The platform workers' conditions are not only on our radar screen, but also in our programme. And I hear you loud and clear on the territorial aspects, because I think you put it very eloquently and several members of the committee have been making reference to that as well. And I think that's sure that help, that assistance to make sure that we would provide the member states with financial means for the people not to lose their jobs. It was very welcome one. And I believe that this is also ingredient of something bigger and even more efficient coming to the future. To Madam Alandra Graham from Sweden, thank you very much for your contribution and for the way in which we can learn from Sweden and other countries how to introduce lifelong learning, how to adjust the curricula in our universities to make sure that our factories working on the future technologies would have, as until today, the best high-qualified workforce on this planet. And we know that this needs permanent attention and good work with educational establishment. To the Mr. Jungman Ropp and Mr. Bernwos, I would respond at the same time, I don't think that we are standing in front of the dilemma to help the economy or to tackle climate change. I think that by investing into the right policies and into the technologies of the future, we are actually starting and accelerating this new green growth for European Commission. The green policies are the growth policies as well. We see how many jobs have been created in the green sectors and how the future-oriented companies are thriving despite the COVID-19 and the difficulty. So we want to bring a lot of financial resources but to invest them into the future-oriented economic sectors. To Mr. McCarthy, I'm very glad that we managed to find the good solution with the Chancellor's goal on Monday, very late in the evening, which we are now formalizing and finalizing on the proper and timely implementation of the withdrawal agreement. I'm glad that we agreed we resolved all the problems and therefore I'm confident that as of 1st of January, the withdrawal would be as it was agreed upon in the treaty, which is, I think, the best possible news for the people in Ireland and Northern Ireland, but also for the peace and prosperity of the island of Ireland. And to Mr. Wors, that's the last part of my answer, which I would combine also to Mr. Cordero, Porto, we very much want to include your insights on active subsidiarity, inclusion of regions and local authorities into our fit for future platform. There are three representatives of the Committee of Regions. I know that these are highly competent people, so hopefully they can come across and tell us what to do better. And we also are going to work very, very closely with your Reg HAP expertise and the last sentence would go to Porto. All of us are looking forward to come to your social summit to the beautiful city of Porto, hopefully physical presence and I'm sure it will be a beautiful time. So thank you very much and thank you, dear Apostles. Now I really have to run because I'm already late. So thanks a lot and bye-bye. Thank you very much, Vice President. Dear colleagues, we end this very interesting debate at this point. After all, with Vice President Sefsiovic, we will have the opportunity to discuss again very soon. I'm sure about that. He's a very good friend of the Committee of the Regions and we have great things to do together. So thank you all for participating.