Vladimir Putin’s opening address:

Good afternoon, colleagues,

We have nine items on the agenda today, but I’d like to pause at length over two of them.

The first item is a draft of the foundations of government policy of environmental protection in the period until 2030. I won’t talk about the importance of this issue or mention how many unresolved problems remain here. We have certainly made some serious efforts in this field recently. For instance, we have started a general clean-up of the Arctic. We are employing new standards and markedly new technology and are increasing requirements to industries.

Still, a huge proportion of our cities are still in bad shape, with about 40% of our urban population living in cities with polluted air. I have already said this many times and would like to repeat it here – metallurgy and other industries are taking steps to improve the situation and changing things for the better but there are still a great many problems. Of course, we must achieve a sound balance between the challenges of economic development and the requirements of environmental protection. The document we are going to discuss and adopt today is aimed at properly regulating this sphere, with due account of modern requirements.

The second item, which is the first on the agenda, concerns the rendering of services to the people. Both items concern the interests of practically all people in Russia without exception. We are moving in this direction at a good pace. Several hundred institutions (over 600) have one-stop windows, but this is by no means enough. Federal authorities are now also rendering electronic services and I hope they will remove all interdepartmental problems. You know that next summer we will have to take a new, much more important step, in transitioning regional authorities over to electronic services. They will have many more problems associated with coordination at departmental and regional levels. The institutions that have one-stop window are doing a good job – I have visited them many times and have seen how they operate. Indeed, many things are changing for the better and the people are content. But, let me repeat that much still remains to be done and let’s discuss this too.

There are also other issues – nine in all and each of them requires spending government funds. Let’s get to work.