A draft Commission communication on reform of the EU budget has been widely leaked yesterday. The full communication is expected to be published next month in response to the consultation exercise on the EU budget which was mandated as part of the Inter-Institutional Agreement in May 2006 on the EU medium-term financial framework (MFF) for the 2007-2013 period. It is not, in itself, a proposal for the next MFF to start in 2014 which will be the prerogative of the new Commission when it takes up office at the start of next year, and which will not be presented until the first half of 2011. Nonetheless, the forthcoming communication sets out the choices facing Member States as they prepare for these negotiations in a clear fashion.
I discussed some of these choices in my paper to the recent ESRI/FFS Annual Budget Perspectives conference. On the expenditure side, the make-up of EU budget expenditure in 2013 will be roughly one-third for CAP income and market support measures, one third for cohesion policy, and one-third for everything else – rural development, research and external actions being the most important.
There is broad support for shifting the composition of budget expenditure towards meeting some of the global challenges facing the EU, including addressing issues of energy security, climate change, competitiveness, migration and projecting a more ambitious global European presence. The key principle is that budget spending should only be undertaken where it can be shown that there is a clear European value added over national spending.