Brussels, 07/09/2001 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday evening in Strasbourg, some MEPs were critical of both the outcome of and the manner in which the Council carried out its first reading of the draft 2002 budget in July (see EUROPE of 21 July, p.7). The EP is gearing up to vote on the budget in October, and can be said to have set the tone for the remainder of the budget procedure.
We are extremely disappointed with the outcome of the meeting and I will therefore have to make what had become standard comments for me for a period of 12 years, but which I had dropped last year, said the President of the EP's Budget Committee, Terence Wynn (UK, Labour) in substance, again voicing regret that the draft budget had been drawn up by COREPER alone (since the Council had accepted its compromise without any changes), so the conciliation meeting ahead of the Council vote in July did not come to anything. He criticised the fact that unlike the EP which attempted to make the budget reflect political priorities, the Council simply aimed to keep spending down, regardless of the costs of future activities and policies. He said this attitude would impact both on the results that were achieved from the Structural Funds and on internal policy (Mr Wynn said that there was no point in the Council cutting more than EUR 1.9 million from the budget of the medical agencies), but also on external actions (here he felt it would have been legitimate to transfer credits foreseen under Heading 4 for Malta and Cyprus to Heading 7 - Pre-accession aid) and the problem of the funds which were still held "in reserve" (EUR 125 million) for the fisheries agreement with Morocco.
At the presentation of the results of the first reading of the draft budget for 2002 (carried out in July 2001 by the Council), the President of the Budget Council, Belgian Minister Johan Vande Lanotte did, however, strive to demonstrate that concertation between the Council and the Parliament should be considered as the beginning of a debate; even if the outcome of the meeting did not produce any immediate effects, the Council position had been influenced by the two budget three-way dialogues before the Council's vote; and that the Council's position reflected an effort toward moderation particularly with regard to the breakdown of obligatory and non-obligatory spending. Mr Vande Lanotte remarked that the draft that had been put together by the Council provided the following guarantees: a sufficient margin would be maintained below the upper limit set by the Financial Perspectives under most headings (EUR 1.565 billion for agricultural spending, EUR 111 million for internal policies, EUR 100 million for external action); greater transparency in the procedure since the Council had followed the guidelines that it had adopted for the first time in March 2001; and financing EU activities within the framework of the available resources and without surcharging the public purse of Member States. The Council President regretted that no agreement had been reached on CFSP credits (which will be resolved under the Interinstitutional Agreement of 1999 by adopting the credits proposed by the European Commission in its Preliminary Draft Budget). On the latter point, he remarked that he could not understand why the EP had attempted to reduce some of this spending since these modest credits were designed to guarantee the EU's place in the international arena.
In terms of the increase in the Council's operational budget (which is the budget that would "increase the most"), Kathalijne Buitenweg (Green, the Netherlands) argues that a calculation should also be made of the budgetary consequences of the summits of heads of state). She qualified the fact that Eurojust credits had been incorporated under Heading 3 as a rather unhappy choice, adding that in her opinion it would have been more sensible to put administrative expenditure in category 5. Carlos Costa Neves (EPP-ED, Portugal), rapporteur for the 2002 budget, said that the Council's and the EP's position differed from each other quite considerably.