MEPs to endorse 5.2% budget increase

Parliament wants €133bn for the EU budget as MEPs argue more money is needed for jobs and growth.

The European Parliament will call for a substantial increase in spending in the EU’s 2012 budget on Wednesday (26 October) during its plenary week in Strasbourg. The MEPs will endorse a 5.2% increase compared to this year’s EU budget, which totals €126.5 billion – well above the 2.02% increase recommended by member states in July.

The Parliament is to back an EU budget totalling €133.14bn. The Council of Ministers recommended €129bn, and the European Commission proposed total spending of €132.7bn.

The Parliament’s budgets committee said that the Commission’s 4.9% increase was the bare minimum that MEPs could accept in budget negotiations with the Council. However, the committee voted earlier this month to add millions more in expenditure on areas such as research and development, the Europe 2020 strategy for jobs and growth, and aid to the Palestinians. The committee also voiced its opposition to cuts to cohesion policy funds urged by the Council.

Jobs and growth

Francesca Balzani, an Italian centre-left MEP, who drafted the Parliament’s negotiating position, said that jobs and growth had to be the “main priority” of next year’s EU budget. The Parliament could not, she said, accept the Council’s call for cuts to spending on cohesion policy, administration and the EU’s home affairs and justice policies, including the EU’s border agency Frontex. She said the EU budget had to offer “an adequate response” to the EU’s economic crisis.

The Parliament line is likely to cause further rows with the member states. The two sides have already clashed in a debate last month over the Council’s position on the 2012 budget: it recommended slashing €3.65bn from the Commission’s proposal. Once the Parliament’s position has been approved in Strasbourg, negotiations will start formally on 3 November. The two sides will then, under the rules of the Lisbon treaty, have two weeks to reach agreement.

Negotiations will be further hampered by MEPs’ determination to use their October plenary session to refuse to sign off on the Council’s 2009 budget accounts. Crescenzio Rivellini, a centre-right Italian MEP, who drafted the Parliament’s position on the Council’s 2009 discharge, has recommended refusal as a protest against a lack of co-operation. His report, expected to be approved on Wednesday (26 October), demands that the Council provide more information over how it spent its funds in 2009.

The 2009 discharge procedure is the latest round in a three-year feud between MEPs and member states. At issue is how much oversight MEPs have over money spent by the Council on such matters as the EU’s common foreign and security policy.

Poland, the current holder of the EU’s presidency of the Council of Ministers, further stoked the issue by rejecting Parliament’s demands that it provide more information, maintaining that its accounts were automatically signed off when MEPs approved the accounts of the EU’s general budget and European Commission in May. A Polish EU presidency official said the Council considers the 2009 procedure “closed”.

Accounts to be signed off

The MEPs have, however, yet to sign off on the accounts of the European Police College (Cepol) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), both of which were postponed in May to give them time to “remedy shortcomings” in management.

At the plenary, MEPs will also vote on a report recommending that the EU make it easier for smaller companies to bid for public procurement contracts, and review how member states adhered to implemention of the EU’s new annual cycle of economic policy co-ordination and reporting under the ‘European semester’.

? MEPs will be joined by members of national parliaments and government ministers for a two-day debate on the EU’s 2014-20 spending plans starting today (20 October) in Brussels.

The conference is supposed to bring national parliaments up to speed on the proposals for the post-2013 multi-annual financial framework (MFF).

A spokesman for the Polish government, which holds the presidency of the Council of Ministers, said Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, would defend the “added value” that EU spending can provide to national budgets in the current austerity. Alain Lamassoure, chair of the Parliament’s budgets committee, will support this line. “The European budget is an additional level to revive growth,” he said.

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