Parliament ‘will have tough time matching plans to spending’

MEPs say budget increase may not be enough to fund spending.

MEPs have admitted that they will struggle to get a large enough increase in the EU budget to fund their spending priorities next year. 

A working paper on the Parliament’s 2012 budget priorities suggested that the EU budget should be increased by 4.2% compared to 2011.

László Surján, a centre-right MEP from Hungary, described the increase as “extremely ambitious in the current climate”. Carl Haglund, a Finnish Liberal MEP, said: “The economic situation is not very easy. The 2011 budget negotiations were difficult, so the 2012 negotiations will be as difficult.”

He predicted that it would “not be easy to find money in the budget. The best thing we can hope for is that there is unspent money.”

“It is obvious that the Council’s attitude will create a number of problems for us,” said Göran Färm, a Swedish centre-left MEP, referring to national governments’ demands for a budget that reflected the tough economic climate.

Rise in spending

He said the difficulty in the past two years of the current budget programme, which ends in 2013, was the steady increase in spending on multi-annual structural and regional aid programmes. These spending levels were agreed in 2005.

Färm said he was not sure that member states understood that they could not alter agreed funding levels when calling for a slimmed-down budget.

Jobs and growth

Francesca Balzani, a centre-left MEP from Italy who is in charge of drafting the Parliament’s position on the 2012 EU budget, said that MEPs would have “little room for manoeuvre” to push the Parliament’s priorities.

The Parliament faced a “political dilemma” in trying to reconcile its demands for more spending on EU jobs and growth programmes while also considering member states’ demands for a limited EU budget, she said.

She saw the priority for the Parliament as ensuring adequate funding for Europe 2020, the EU’s growth and jobs strategy.