COMMUNITY OWN RESOURCES
by Altiero Spinelli
SUMMARY: The European Parliament considers the report presented by Spinelli on behalf of the ommittee on Budgets on Community own resources.
This report is the result of more than a year's work by an ad hoc group of the Committee on Budgets, chaired by Spinelli and made up of Mr Arndt (Socialist), Mr Barbi (Christian Democrat), Mr Nord (Liberal), Mr Ansquer (Gaullist) and Mr Taylor (Conservative), to which contributions were made by expert and politicians Horn all over Europe.
The debate in the House closed with Spinelli's reply (see his second intervention), and voting on the report is deferred to the next sitting on 9 April 1981. "Speeches in European Parliament, 1976-1986", Pier Virgilio Dastoli Editor. (EP, 14 January 1981)
In the short time at my disposal, Mr President, I shall not be able to explain as I should have wished how much of this report is due to the individual work of the six members of the working party from the six major political groups in the House and also to our close team-work. You will find their names on the first page of the document in front of you. What you will not find, because it is not customary, are the names of our helpers from the committee secretariat. I should like to take this opportunity of thanking them all, and especially Mr Guccione and Mr Giraud. Without their willing and expert help we should not have found it so easy to cope with the task we had.
A parliamentary motion on the Community's new own resources proved necessary, Mr President, because of the last Commission's obvious and shocking reluctance to fulfil one of its specific duties. The old Commission knew better than any other institution that the Community resources covered by the Treaties were about to run out and on several occasions it announced its ideas. But all it could come up with was a white paper in which various tax-related alternatives were considered. I know it is useful for the Commission to prepare white papers and memoranda, but its special task is to produce proposals for regulations and directives and changes to the Treaties.
This depressing allegation of deficiency does not apply to Mr Tugendhat. As we all know, he was constantly trying to stir the old Commission out of its lethargy, but without success. We hope he will be more sucessful with the new Commission, in which we are delighted to see that he has kept the same job as he had before.
If Parliament adopts this motion for a resolutionand this is what I am asking on behalf of the Committee on BudgetsIt will be asking the Commission to comply with what the motion demands.This will be the crunch point in the hoped - for cooperation between the Commission and Parliament. For this reason we do not expect Mr Tugendhat to be very specific in outlining the Commission response to this report. We appreciate that the new Commission will not have had time to discuss it, but we expect an answer next month.
The proposal to provide the Community with new fiscal resources is inextricably linked to the adoption of regulations and directives on the organization of agricultural markets. While complying with each and every one of the Treaty conditions on agricultural policy, the new legislation will nevertheless put an end to the soaring costs of the price support systems and the creation of expensive surpluses. If this condition were not satisfied, it would be inadmissible and irresponsible to go looking for more money for this bottomless pit. It is not our job to say what the new agricultural policy should be at this time, but we were duty-bound to make quite clear - and this we have done - what budgetary policy it will have to comply with.
New resources are needed because new common policies are needed. We are asking the Commission, when it submits its programme to the Council, to undertake to propose without delay the abolition of the 1 % ceiling on the VAT yield and the VAT corrective mechanism. We want it to undertake to present proposals for developing the loans policy in line which the wishes of the European Parliament, and we want it to include the co-responsibility levy in the budget revenue. We want precise details of the timetable for presenting proposals on complete harmonization of the basis of assessment and subsequently of VAT rates, introduction of the declaration-based method of VAT collection, supervision of collection of duties, issue of ECU-denominated Community bonds and possible harmonization of the basis of assessment and of the rates of direct and indirect taxation. Finally, we want the Commission to withdraw the 1973 proposal for an amendment of Article 201 EEC and introduce a new proposal in line with the decision-makin
g mechanism suggested by the European Parl' lamerit.
I should like to mention in more detail two points which may perhaps be considered the major innovations in our proposal. The first point is that we need to introduce greater equity among the Member States in the Community tax system. For this purpose a corrective mechanism which will not affect the method by which own resources are paid by the citizens of the Community but which will raise the Community VAT rate for the richer countries and lower it for the poorer ones. Mr Arndt devoted himself to working out this idea with exceptional skill and attention and he will probably have an opportunity of explaining it himself in greater detail.
The second innovation we propose has wider implications. The Community and its Member States are separate political entities, each with its own institutions, its own policies, its own budget and therefore its own resources. Both the Community and the Member States are financed in the same way, by taxes paid by the citizens who are at the same time citizens of their own country and the Community.
We therefore propose that Parliament, as representative of the Community's citizens, should in the first year following its election consider with the Commission whether, and under what conditions, there should he a reallocation of responsibilities and financial resources, between the Member States and the Community for the next five-year period, and that it should also adopt a draft joint declaration on the Community's financial needs and resources. This would serve as a genuine guideline programme in political and financial terms for the following five years.
Since we are already in the third year, we think this idea could be introduced at once, at least for the time we have left before the next European elections. This would be a very democratic way of finding out which of the fiscal resources should be switched for a time from the national to the Community budget or the other way, and there would be no risk - which we fear just as much as the Council and some of the governments do - that the Community's financial autonomy would degenerate into financial irresponsibility. It is an open question where, in which institution, the danger of irresponsibility lurks.
On the last and umpteenth occasion that a budgetary crisis split Parliament and the Council, one Head of Government said that when it came to deciding on the Community's revenue the governments had the final say. He was way off the mark. It is Parliament which has the last say on the entire budget, both revenue and expenditure, apart from the so-called compulsory expenditure.
You just have to read the Treaties, and as someone who spent years in the Commission, which acts as the guardian of the Treaties, I ought to know what I am talking about.
It is about time we stopped this squabbling which recurs at the end of every year between those of us who think that the Community is doing too little and making a bad job of it and the Council which considers that too much is being done. A way out can be found only if we introduce an opportunity for multiannual programmes which have been democratically discussed and adopted, and scope for policies to be implemented and consequently resources to be distributed.
Mr President, this topic of own resources really deserves more detailed comment on my part, but it is typical of the crazy times we live in that a debate of this importance has to be over in an hour and a half. So I am stopping now.
Mr President, can I just point out that both Mr Tugendhat and some other speakers have mentioned another debate. There is not going to be another debate; we are simply going to present the amendments and vote on them.
In this connection can I ask the chair - and I am speaking here for Mr Lange, too - for a definite deadline to be set for the amendments, so that the Committee on Budgets has a chance to look at them and arrive at a considered opinion one way or the other, without leaving it up to me to interpret as best I can the views of the committee at the next partsession. Several Groups say that they have not thought about it yet. I find this surprising. We have been working on this subject for a year, and plenty of ideas and drafts and almost final documents have been around for a while. The matter could have been dealt with by now.
As for the various speeches we have heard. I am not going to bother about those which were actually against the development of the Community and which are therefore against any plans to increase the Community's resources. The reasons for this opposition are political and consequently have nothing to do with budgetary problems. If these people form a majority in Parliament, a motion like this will not get through. If it is going to get through, these people will have to be in a minority. I have nothing else in particular to say on this point.
I shall respond instead to those who said they were convinced that the Community had to develop. In the first place I should like to make one or two comments about what Mr Tugendhat said. Now if I were a cartonist, I should draw a picture of him hopping about beside a tortoise and telling it: 'For heaven's sake take it easy, there's no rush; take your time, don't go rushing into things!' The Community we have takes months and years to carry out the simplest operation. You know very well, Mr Tugendhat, that if we do not want to end up in a year or so in the same state as we almost found ourselves this year, we have to start right away to submit proposals on the matter of own resources, because it all needs to be discussed, to be mulled over by the Council, and to be approved by the national parliaments. There is no time to lose.
Mr Tugendhat also mentioned the tremendous problems related to the changeover from a statistical to a declaration-based method of VAT collection. Two countries are already using the method of individual declaration without any problems. It is a well known fact, because it was the opposition of Belgium - behind whom all the other countries fell into line - which meant that this system was not introduced right from the start. At the time it was said that everyone should be using the declaration-based method by 1 January 1985. But what has the Commission done to bring this about? The Commission has been twiddling its thumbs and now it comes and tells us there are Problems and complications. I fail to see why these problems, which Denmark and Ireland managed to solve, could not be solved in other countries which were basically ready to deal with them five or six years ago.
If the Community needs to develop, it must have the opportunity to do so. This is the point we are trying to make. If there is no need, it will not make use of the opportunity. The impression we did not want to give was that Parliament was asking for the 1 % limit to be abolished simply because, in a moment of mandness, it felt it had to put forw ard ideas for vast expenditure. What we said was that we needed to introduce a method of preparing things and working them out, whereby we had to progress in parallel fashion by units which are naturally longer than a year. This explains why we referred to legislative terms in which the Community will have to be ready to tackle problems of this kind for the succeeding five years - and this is why it is going to need these financial resources - so that all the Member States, the national parliaments, the governments, the Commission and Parliament know what is going on. The tenor of the budget debates will then be one of settlement and everyone will at last know what
the general policy of the Community is.
This is the only way we are going to give the lie to that specious argument which maintains that there can be no talk of new resources until we have some policies. How often did we hear the cry that Parliament could not be elected because it had no responsibility and that it could not be given responsibility because it was not elected? The same thing can be said now: there can be no new resources because there are no policies, but no policies can be introduced because the resources are lacking. Consequently, it is up to us to say that we need new policies, explain why, work out an agreement and therefore give the Community new resources.
If this is going to be done, we cannot resort to some involved procedure each time. What we have to do in a way is create the opportunities and then make sure that they can be suitably implemented. This is why we suggested for a start that the 1 % ceiling should be abolished. A few Members who have obviously not read the report very carefully have put forward the argument that we have failed to realize that corrective mechanisms are required and that we should therefore go back to those proposed by Mr Lange. Can I just point out that Mr Arndt's contribution on the corrective mechanisms constitutes the finishing touch to the need outlined by Mr Lange as part of a European tax system. We want to put this together, although of course it is not going to be the answer to all our problems. It is a corrective mechanism, after all. Complex spending, meaning spending which is not restricted to one policy, needs to be overhauled but this is not the job of a report on the Community's new resources. We can just point ou
t the need and this is what we have done.
As for the loans policy, our report is perhaps not explicit on the matter but it indicates clearly enough that policy on investment and development must not be limited simply to taking out loans and then granting them, which is what happens at the moment. The policy has to be conceived for investments and for development and not just for current spending or to cover debts which have been incurred for this purpose.
Several Members have said that this result could be reached in the long run. One Member said especially that he was against abolishing the 1% limit but then went on to talk about the limits mentioned in the MacDougal report. You ings at once. You have to make up your cannot have two th mind: one thing or the other. We realize that some of the needs we have outlined here will take years. When Mr Tugendhat tells us the Commission cannot give any dates, we should like to know when it intends to start on the job and how long, more or less, it reckons it will take. Was it not some English lord said 'Death closes all but something ere the end may yet be done'?
Mr Tugendhat correctly said that he could not give an answer to all these questions here and now. I had pointed out however that I was not expecting an immediate answer from the Commission. The new Commission took over only a couple of weeks ago and naturally will not have had the time to discuss these matters. Since at the same time the Commission has said that it cannot cover a whole range of issues and that it has various views, I should like to offer it one specific proposal. For the time being this is a personal suggestion, but I hope that next time it will be a proposal made on behalf of the committee and with Parliament, s backing. The point is that the Commission is undoubtedly going to look at our report and the MacDougal report, consider the views of the Commissioners and come up with a few ideas. You are going to disagree with us on many points, to be sure. As you think things over, however, we should like you to come back and discuss matters with us, principally together with the Committee on Bud
gets but now and then here in Parliament as well. You could tell us how your thoughts are progressing and give us an idea of how you see things. You could suggest how some part or other of a resolution might be reworked and offer ideas for changes, and so on. Let Parliament in on this process of working things out. It may be your job, but do not keep it to yourselves behind closed doors, or just with Coreper, which means sole regard for national interests, but come and discuss things with the committee and with Parliament itself. Let us not have a repeat of what happened in the case of the regulation on amending the staff regulations. This was a document which you in the Commission drew up but which was discussed by Coreper even before the Commission got round to considering it. just look at the dates' We should like this document we have adopted to have a different fate. Start discussing it with us, and let it be a starting point for all the debates we have with you. I have no doubts about commitment to Eur
ope at the head of the Commission, and so I am sure that if we go about things like this we shall be able to clarify our ideas and reach some agreement and that you will feel you are getting more support than you have been accustomed to in the past.
I want to wind up with these words, although there is something I should like to urge upon every Member. I realize that a few amendments need to be made, even though only one comes to mind at the moment, the point Mr Visentini nade about streamlining the final decision-making mechanism, which is certainly a problem that needs to be looked at closely. Anyway, what I want to say is that Members should try to table as few amendments as possible and make do with the most relevant ones so that we do not get overwhelmed by modifications. I should like them to remember that this document is the fruit of a year's labour and that people from all sides have been involved and have given their opinion. This means that the report already offers a fairly wide basis for agreement.
