“There is no Commission document on this subject, nor for that matter any document from DG Budget”, assured European Commission spokesperson Eric Mamer on Monday 7 October, referring to a European Commission working document on the next Multiannual Financial Framework.
This working document, which apparently emerged from a DG BUDG workshop and which Politico has seen, would confirm the shift from a programme-based budget to a policy-based budget, as announced in the mission letter to the Commissioner-designate for Budget, Piotr Serafin (see EUROPE 13486/14).
Based on the model of the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’, most of the budget would be transferred to the Member States through national plans that would link investment to reform, on a ‘cash for reform’ basis.
Contacted by Agence Europe the day after the publication of the mission letter, French MEP and S&D budget coordinator Jean-Marc Germain, felt that the move to a policy-based budget would make sense if it enabled a move away from “a silo approach, with programmes that all have the same purpose”. In the meantime, the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgets has nevertheless questioned whether this change in strategy will affect the number and nature of EU spending programmes. This question has been addressed to the Commissioner-designate for Budget, Piotr Serafin, with a view to his hearing, as indicated in a draft questionnaire published by Contexte.
For its part, the European Committee of the Regions fears that cohesion policy will be weakened if the Commission negotiates national programmes directly with the Member States. On Monday 7 October, the President of the European Committee of the Regions, Vasco Alves Cordeiro, mentioned an “unequivocal rejection of a recent idea to have a single programme at national level in the new Multiannual Financial Framework”. The EU’s regions and cities would find themselves “excluded, sidelined, bypassed”.
As for the publication of an official Commission document, its spokesperson pointed out on Monday that the Commission would only have to “present its proposals for the future Multiannual Financial Framework around mid-2025” and that “it is then [that it will be] in a position to unveil the College’s proposals”. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)