Tuesday, 14 May - Speaking on the Commission's preliminary draft budget for 1992 of 65.2bn ECU in commitments and 63bn ECU in payments, an 11% increase on 1991, Petrus Cornelissen (N, EPP) said it was essential for the Commission to respect the financial perspectives and there was a need to re-arrange the figures within the different headings. Just 119m ECU for the environment was inadequate, he said.

James Elles (Oxford and Buckinghamshire, ED) expressed his disappointment at the failure to include a mechanism for consulting Parliament for the approval of future aid programmes and he too, felt Council was shortsighted in not accepting the need for a reserve. He warned that with increasing demands on the Community's finances the situation was going to get worse.

Terry Wynn (Merseyside, Soc) felt that a further revision of the financial perspective could be required sooner rather than later because of the deteriorating situation in Africa where Oxfam has reported that there is less than 10 days food supply left in Ethiopia. Like John Tomlinson (Birm-ingham West, Soc) he didn't agree with the Council's interpretation that there was no money left for emergencies and he described the Council's refusal to set up a reserve fund for such events as 'shortsighted'.

In reply, Budget Commissioner Peter Schmidhüber said the 1992 preliminary draft budget respected the various sub-ceilings under the financial perspective. He refutedd criticism that not enough resources were earmarked for internal policy by pointing out that the average increases from 1990 to 1992 for energy were 74%, 95% for audiovisual, 89% for vocational training, 59% for transport and 51% for environment which were all priorities denoted by Parliament.

As for foreign policy, he felt a further revision of the financial perspective was inevitable.

Winding up the debate Jean-Claude Junker said the Council had decided to finance the 60m ECU of special aid for Bangladesh on an inter-governmental basis rather than by a further revision of the financial perspective. This was because certain countries were not keen to undertake another revision before the current one was completed, added Mr Junker.