Brussels, 09/12/2014 (Agence Europe) - A package including the EU budget for 2015 and the amending budgets for 2014 was approved by qualified majority in the committee of the permanent representatives of the member states to the EU (Coreper). Two delegations (Sweden and United Kingdom) have to consult their governments before deciding their positions; all the other delegations voted to approve the package.
The compromise reached between the EU institutions still has to be confirmed by the European Parliament budgets committee on Thursday 11 December. The package will then be formally adopted by the Council of the EU on Friday 12 December. The Parliament will adopt the 2015 budget and the 2014 amending budgets on 17 December at the plenary session in Strasbourg.
“The budget agreement approved today squares the circle between three crucial challenges: the need to address the backlog of payments, the importance not to jeopardise member states' efforts to consolidate their public finance and the necessity to provide indispensable stimuli for creating jobs and generating growth in the future”, commented Pier Carlo Padoan, Italian finance minister and Council president.
Payment of invoices. Agreement was reached on an envelope of €4.7 billion to pay the bills in 2014 (€3.5 billion) and 2015 (€1.2 billion). To make up the €3.5 billion, €3.2 billion will come from the “contingency margin” and using €361 million below the multiannual financial framework (MFF) ceiling. “The increase in payments is more than offset by additional revenue from fines, the financial surplus from 2013 and the revised forecast of own resources,” states the Council in a press release. Additionally, the use of scarce resources is optimised by redeploying €30 million from budget lines on which the implementation rate is currently particularly low.
“Reducing the number of unpaid bills was the Parliament's main objective. We cannot continue to delay payment of invoices until the next year because of a lack of resources”, stated the Parliament budgets committee chairman, Jean Arthuis (ALDE, France). The total value of outstanding bills has risen from €5 billion in 2010 to €23.4 billion at the start of 2014. Without the additional funding demanded by the Parliament, this sum would have continued to grow, bringing with it the risk that the budget might collapse, the parliament feared.
Gérard Deprez (ALDE, Belgium), who led the negotiations on filling the 2014 budget coffers, says that the Parliament would like to know how the Commission intends to reduce outstanding bills between now and 2016. The Parliament negotiators accepted the 2015 budget on condition that the Commission bring forward a proposal to reduce the sum in unpaid bills to a sustainable level by 2016.
2015 Budget. The total value of the 2015 budget was set at €145.3 billion in commitment appropriations (1.8% more than the 2014 budget as amended) and €141.2 billion in credit appropriations (1.6% more than the 2014 amended budget). The budget as it stands leaves sufficient margins under the ceilings of the MFF 2014-2020 to allow the EU to react to unforeseen events. The payments for activities such as research, innovation and education increase by more than 38% or €4.4 billion compared to the 2014 EU budget as adopted last year.
The Parliament says it won €45 million more for the European research programme (Horizon 2020) and €16 million more for the student exchange scheme Erasmus+. The budget for foreign policy was increased by €32 million. The banking supervision and Frontex agencies will also have their funding increased.
Agricultural reserve spared. The support measures for farmers hit by the Russian food ban will be financed through higher than expected financial surpluses. The €430-million agricultural crisis reserve will not, then, be used to finance measures to offset the impact of the Russian ban, as farmers and 22 EU countries had asked.
Solidarity fund. To remedy damage caused by natural disasters, payments of a total amount of €126.7 billion will be mobilised under the EU solidarity fund for Serbia (€60.2 million), Slovenia (€18.4 million), Croatia (€17.6 million), Italy (€16.3 million), Bulgaria (€10.5 million) and Greece (€3.7 million).
Special instruments. The Parliament wanted the special instruments (EU solidarity fund, globalisation adjustment fund, emergency aid reserve and flexibility instrument) to receive funding above the MFF 2014-2020 ceiling, while the Council was keen for funding for these instruments to be within the ceiling. The Council and the Parliament have agreed that the amount mobilised via the contingency margin in this year's budget should include €350 million from the special instruments for which they will decide at a later stage whether and to what extent their payments are financed within or above the MFF ceiling.
Lastly, the Parliament has undertaken next week to adopt its opinion (consultative) in plenary session on the proposal amending the regulation on own resources (which will allow the United Kingdom to spread payment of its additional contribution to the EU budget until September 2015). (LC)