Brussels, 29/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - The cuts made by the Council in the EU budget for 2016 to the funds earmarked for refugees and agencies responsible for migrants have been cancelled by the committee on budgets of the European Parliament, in the voting sessions on Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 September.
The MEPs also added funds in favour of youth employment, the student mobility programme Erasmus+ and for research, transport and the energy networks.
The budgets committee analysed in excess of 1,900 amendments and is aware that the 2016 budget will undergo modifications after the budgetary decisions of Wednesday 30 September, on the 'migrations package'.
The budgets committee proposes a 2016 budget for the EU of €157.4 billion in commitment appropriations and €146.5 billion in payment appropriations. The cuts made by the Council to the European Commission's initial draft budget have therefore effectively been overturned. In its position of early September, the Council decided to reduce the Commission's initial proposal by €564 million in commitments and €1.42 billion in payments.
“Our amendments enable the budget to face up to the challenges posed by the refugee crisis, beef up programmes in employment, and help dairy farmers. We propose 1.2 billion euros of migration funds, programmes and agencies. We want the Youth Employment Initiative to continue and, to deliver past promises, we also proposed extra funds for Horizon 2020. We devoted 500 million euros for dairy farmers - it remains to be seen whether Council will stand by this during the negotiations”, said the rapporteur on the 2016 budget of the EU, José Manuel Fernandes (EPP, Portugal).
Migrations. The MEPs have added a total of €1.2 billion, under various budgetary headings, to help European agencies to manage the arrival and transfer of unprecedented flows of migrants and refugees. They have also added funds to manage the underlying causes of the waves of migration, and also to assist third countries such as Ukraine.
Entreprise and youth. To further Parliament's aim of helping enterprises and fostering entrepreneurship, the MEPs added €16.5 million to the amount originally proposed by the Commission for the EU's COSME programme in favour of small and medium-sized enterprises. Additionally, the parliamentary committee has added €473 million in credits for future Youth Employment Initiative programmes and an extra €14 million for the student mobility programme Erasmus+.
Research, networks and agriculture. The budgets committee put back €1.3 billion into the European research and development programme Horizon 2020 and transport and energy networks programmes. This money had been diverted to feed the investment guarantee fund behind the Juncker plan. The committee also included an extra €500 million to help dairy farmers affected by falling prices.
Financial regulators. Three EU financial regulatory bodies - the European Banking Authority, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority - set up in 2011 in response to the financial crisis also receive extra funds to carry out their tasks properly.
Payments. To enable the EU to pay its bills due in 2016, the MEPs reversed all Council cuts in the draft budget, assuming that figures in it were necessary to execute the payment plan agreed among the institutions in May to bring the level of outstanding bills to a manageable level. In order to guarantee that the measures taken to ease Greece's access to EU funds (as proposed by the European Commission in July) do not jeopardise planned reductions in the amount of unpaid bills in 2016, the committee voted an additional €1 billion in payments for Greece.
The EP will vote on the budgetary amendments on 28 October. A period of three weeks of conciliation talks with the Council will then begin. The Parliament is planning to adopt the 2016 budget in early November. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)