Brussels, 29/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - The amending budget laying down additional payment appropriations requested by the European Commission will be one of the main areas to be settled in the process of drawing up the EU's budget for 2013, as emerged from a meeting on Friday 26 October of the Conciliation Committee for the 2013 budget. No talks took place as such on Friday, simply a statement of differing views by the various EU institutions.
The EU institutions discussed the 2013 budget and the draft amending budget 6/2012 on the need for further payment appropriations.
Divergent views amongst ministers on the amending budget
On the various Council of Ministers' technical bodies, the net contributing countries regret the fact that the Commission is mixing income and expenditure in the same amending budget. Several sources say this attitude is seen as a way of providing a bit of sugar to help the bitter medicine go down. The Commission assesses the needs for additional payment appropriations at €9 billion. There are €3 billion of new “own resources” raised by fines for breaking the competition rules, so the member states would have to come up with €6 billion. Net contributing countries want funding to be shifted from other headings to cover the payment gaps for 2012 and are surprised by how much extra funding is set out in this amending budget, which goes beyond the reductions made by the Council and the European Parliament in 2010 and 2011 on the Commission's proposals. Council sources say the reductions on the Commission's proposals stand at around €7.6 billion. The “friends of cohesion” countries say that promises have to be kept and it makes no sense to simply carry the problem over to next year. Thus opinions are divided on the Council of Ministers on draft amending budget 6/2012 and the Council has not yet decided on its position. No member state is actually challenging the financing or running of the Erasmus Programme. Only €90 million of the €9 billion requested is for Erasmus.
At the Conciliation Committee meeting, EU Budget Commissioner Janusz Lewandowski said that the large scale of the draft amending budget was due to the fact that the 2011 and 2012 budgets were low. The president of the Council said that the member states feel the size of the amending budget is hardly very conservative. This is rejected by the Commission.
Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France), who chairs the Parliament's Budgets Committee, suggested that to get out of the impasse and prevent the payment appropriations becoming a political issue (see EUROPE 10718), each country should appoint a body to centralise and verify requests for payment appropriations. It remains to be seen whether the ministers will go along with this idea, was how the Cypriot Presidency responded.
Budget for 2013
The Cypriot Presidency said that the institutions had differing views on the size of the EU's 2013 budget. It pointed out that the starting point for the Parliament/Council talks was that both institutions had the same priorities, supporting programmes to boost competitiveness and convergence and create jobs and growth in the economy. It pointed out that the Council had suggested in June an above-inflation increase in payment appropriations of 2.79% on 2012 (inflation being estimated at 1.9% in 2013). This rise was backed by all EU member states despite their belt-tightening at home. The Cypriot Presidency said a reasonable level of payment appropriations should be returned to, along with the right amount of flexibility, and took note with concern that the Parliament had called for the spending margins under the various budget headings to be scaled back. In sub-heading 1a (Growth), the Parliament even goes beyond the upper spending limits.
The Parliament rapporteur on the 2013 budget, Giovanni La Via (EPP, Italy), said programmes for jobs and growth are essential and the Parliament is calling for the €50 billion for this sub-heading from the flexibility instrument. He warned that if agreement were not reached on all the payments made in 2012, then an increase of greater than 6.8% would be needed for 2013. He added that if the Council and Parliament agreed to amending budget 5 (solidarity fund of €700 million) and 6 for the 2012 budget, then the 2013 budget would in fact be 0.6% lower than the 2012 budget. He said this showed that the Parliament is perfectly aware of the crisis. (LC/transl.fl)