Brussels, 14/02/2000 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday, the European Commission will discuss one of the most sensitive aspects of the budgetary guidelines for 2001: allocation of human resources. This initial part of the policy debate over the budget 2001 will be followed next week by a general debate on all guidelines. On Tuesday, it will be a question of the major outlines of the method, and especially the margin for manoeuvre, in allocating posts to priority fields to be defined next week (probably negotiations on enlargement and the Balkans). On Tuesday, the Commission should therefore discuss the magnitude of the redeployment of staff between Directorates General, the aim being to proceed with sufficient redeployments to create as few as possible new posts. Yet, in all, the different services refer to 800 additional posts demanded for 2001 without any of them identifying possible reductions in personnel: the services are said consider having already provided enough efforts in the matter with the redeployment of 570 posts decided end-December for the year 2000, to which will be added the redeployment of some 250 people due to the gradual abolition of the "Financial Control" DG. The Commission currently has some 26,500 agents (agents of the technical assistance offices not included), 22,000 of which statutory officials.
The Commission would be faced with two solutions that should be discussed, but not necessarily settled this week: i) either identify several activities that could be reduced or finalised, thus freeing 200 posts for the year 2001, allocated to the "priority" policy areas; ii) or carry out, more broadly, 800 new redeployments in 2001, with a 5% reduction in staff at each DG, according to their own indications.
At any rate, the Commission should, according to Community sources, decide on Tuesday on three successive stages for establishing its position on the allocation of human resources, which will be accomplished in September. These three stages are: i) redeployment of human resources within each Directorate General; ii) redeployment between directorates-general; iii) increased staff. Within each DG, it would mainly be a question of evaluating needs and projects according to the political priorities determined by the College, and thus to renounce directly managing small projects that require a large number of personnel. Furthermore, the Commission should set itself the goal of reducing the number of vacant posts from around 4% of authorised posts (or 750 posts) to 2% with the reallocation of posts corresponding to the different DGs.