‘Make or break’ talks for budget

By Simon Taylor

Date: 30/03/06

The EU institutions are to hold make-or-break negotiations over the Union's 2007-13 budget next week (4 April), to avoid jeopardising plans to have spending programmes ready to start disbursing EU funds from 1 January.

The Austrian presidency of the EU is completing its final offer to MEPs and submitted a compromise proposal for discussion by EU ambassadors on 30 March. But MEPs will be disappointed that the proposal rejects their bid for a 12 billion euro increase in the budget on top of the 862bn euro agreed by EU leaders last December. Instead it says that the maximum increase could be around 0.21% of the overall budget (1.5bn euro in 2004 prices). This figure is based on the increase secured by MEPs in negotiations with the Council on the 2000-06 budget.

Vienna wants to devote any increases to foreign policy, which is not a key priority for Parliament. It has also proposed rises for programmes targeting competitiveness and consumer and health protection.

The compromise also looks likely to disappoint MEPs with its calls for greater budget flexibility to allow the EU to deal quickly with emergencies such as the tsunami disaster in Asia. The Commission had proposed increasing flexibility reserves from 200 million euro to 700m euro but this is unlikely to be accepted by governments.

The presidency goes some way to meeting Parliament's requests for national governments to take more responsibility for checking spending of EU funds at national level by committing them to assessing management and control systems.

Article reports that the Austrian Presidency of the EU presented the European Parliament with a compromise proposal on the EU's next multiannual budget, the Financial Perspectives 2007-2013. The next round of negotiations between the institutions was scheduled for 4 April 2006.

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