Member states angered by budget top-up request
Negotiations on 2014-20 budget could be delayed.
The European Commission’s request for an €11.2 billion top-up of the European Union’s budget for the current year has angered member states and sown doubts among MEPs about the reliability of the Commission’s forecasts.
The quarrel about the top-up request, made at the end of March, has the potential to delay three-way negotiations on the EU’s long-term budget for 2014-20, currently in their preparatory phase. The European Parliament has said that it will only agree to the long-term budget once the top-up request has been dealt with.
Lucinda Creighton, Ireland’s Europe minister, told European Voice: “This has significant financial implications for a number of member states, so this is a very big challenge for the Council.” Creighton will lead a discussion on the long-term budget at a meeting of Europe ministers in Luxembourg on Monday (22 April).
“We are very conscious that there are certain expectations here in the Parliament, we are trying to align those expectations with the harsh reality in the Council. We are very confident that we can strike a balance between those concerns and have a deal by the end of our presidency,” she said. Ireland’s turn in the rotating presidency ends on 30 June.
Creighton was cautious in her assessment of the Commission’s proposal. “I think we now have to take that proposal in reasonably good faith. Lewandowski has put figures on the table that he believes are credible and now the Parliament has its job to do and the Council has its job to do.”
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Diplomats said that they had expected a smaller top-up to pay invoices submitted by the member states last year for regional spending; some €2.6bn in unpaid bills had been carried over into this year. Instead, Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and budget, submitted a request for €11.2bn, including €9bn for cohesion spending, saying that this would cover last year’s invoices as well as projected cohesion spending this year.
Lewandowski conceded to the budgets committee in Strasbourg on Monday (15 April) that the consolidation of left-over payment requests and projected spending was done “for political necessity”. But MEPs were sceptical about his assertion that the total requested would cover all the shortfalls for 2013, and complained about the opacity of the figures.
George Lyon, a British Liberal and a vice-chairman of the budgets committee, described the €11.2bn as “maybe a political statement more than an estimate of what is needed in budgetary terms”.
Salvador Garriga, a centre-right Spanish MEP, said: “The only way to convince the member states that this [top-up request] ought to be paid is to convince them that there are budgetary reasons behind this and not just political reasons.”
Earlier this month, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, informed the Dutch parliament that he would seek to form a blocking minority with other governments to get the top-up down to what he saw as a more credible figure.
The top-up request would use up the margin between the 2013 budget as agreed last year and the ceiling set for 2013 by the current multi-annual budget (2007-13). Should the request later this year turn out to have been inadequate, no additional funding could be made available except through a revision of the current multi-annual budget, which requires unanimity among the member states. Annual budgets and the changes to them, by contrast, require a weighted majority of member states. Lewandowski said: “This is going up to the limits of what is feasible with qualified majority voting in 2013.”
A national diplomat said that “the timing, amount and the fact that no margin is left” suggested to him that this was “an opening gambit” from Lewandowski rather than a technical assessment of actual needs.