Luxembourg, 23/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - Alain Lamassoure, chair of the European Parliament's Budgets Committee, warned the European Council at a press conference in Strasburg on Tuesday 23 October about the “rather odd” idea mooted a few weeks ago (and upon which Herman Van Rompuy has been instructed to prepare tangible proposals for the December European Summit) of a eurozone budget that the Parliament would not accept an intergovernmental system for this. The European Summit says the idea of a eurozone budget was not connected in any way with the talks over the EU budget. Lamassoure said as far as the Parliament is concerned, the eurozone budget question in fact interfered with the wider EU budget talks.
The European Parliament is not hostile to the idea of a “fiscal capacity” for the eurozone, but thinks it is strange to come up with the idea at exactly the same time as the negotiations over the 2014-2020 budget, explained Lamassoure at a press conference and also in the plenary debate about the multiannual financial framework (MFF) for 2014-2020. The EP says the fiscal capacity idea is directly connected with the EU budget and Lamassoure is calling for it to be considered at the same time as the MFF for 2014-2020.
The eurozone budget will impact on spending because the idea is that the eurozone budget will be used to help countries that are implementing painful budget consolidation policies (spending cuts) and need some financial aid. Lamassoure said this amounts to reinventing the Cohesion Fund and the Globalisation Fund. Likewise for income. If a new budget is set up, either it will be financed by national contributions (in which case it will be an intergovernmental matter and Lamassoure said he was surprised to see that countries that want to freeze or reduce their contributions to the EU budget are prepared to set up a new budget that they would be contributing to) or the income would come from newly created “own resources” along the lines of the financial transactions tax, which would be money removed from the full EU budget, said Lamassoure. He said that in terms of timing, people say that the idea is for some time in the future and it is true, said Lamassoure, that it would not come on stream on 1 January 2013, but he didn't think that in the middle of a crisis as serious as the debt crisis, the European Summit will cease dealing with ordinary matters to discuss decisions that wouldn't be made until 2020 or later; in other words, the next-but-one generation of politicians He said, we are talking about the same timeframe.
The Parliament is keen on budget unity. If countries want to set up new resources for boosting solidarity in Europe, then why not? If they want new expenditure financed by new resources, then why not? As long as this is part of the EU budget procedure and is subject to scrutiny from the European Parliament. Lamassoure added that the Parliament would not go along with a solution whereby some of the EU budget would be fossilised like a historic monument and remain at no more than 1% of EU27 GDP to finance old policies, and then new “own resources” set up to finance today's requirements by means of intergovernmental processes without any form of proper parliamentary control. (LC/transl.fl)