1982 BUDGET PROCEDURE: ATTITUDE OF THE COMMISSION

by Altiero Spinelli

SUMMARY: The Parliament examines the Commission's attitude to the 1982 budget, thus resuming a practice initiated some years earlier (but followed sporadically).

The rapporteur of the Committee on Budgets for this year is Spinelli himself and he presents a motion for a resolution to the Assembly, which is discussed and voted upon at the next sitting ori 12 March 1981. "Speeches in European Parliament, 1976-1986", Pier Virgilio Dastoli Editor. (EP, 11 March 1981)

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Committee on Budgets proposes that Parliament adopt these guidelines for the 1982 budget at this part-session, before the Commission completes its preparation of the preliminary draft and before the Council begins work on it.

This does not only involve returning to a working method which was adopted in the past, in particular when Mr Shaw and Mr Bangemann were rapporteurs, a method which proved its worth at the time and which was subsequently dropped only because of the exceptional circumstances in which the budgets have been debated in the last two years.

Above all, it is a question of ensuring that the Commission and the Council know the positions of this branch of the budgetary authority in good time and give them due attention, regardless of whether they intend to accept them or whether they feel that they cannot accept it - in which case, however, they will know that they will have to make a special effort to persuade Parliament.

The requests to be found in this document aim to avoid, as far as possible, the seemingly inevitable lastminute clash, full of ill-feeling, irritation and sometimes mutual incomprehension, which has been a feature of the last three years.

Perhaps there will still be a clash, but at least we will have made a serious effort to avoid it, reminding the Commission and the Council right from the beginning that, with regard to the budget, Parliament is not an almost superfluous consulting body, but an equal partner in the decision-making process, that therefore its requests must not be treated lightly.

We therefore intend to say from now on to the Commission especially that its next preliminary draft budget will be a genuine basis for discussion in Parliament and the Council only if it has been preceded by, and based on, four fundamental moves by the Commission itself.

The first move must be the presentation of draft Council decisions intended to regulate the agricultural markets, decisions which safeguard the obligation which the Community will be assuming, with regard to these markets in 1982, and the assurance of multiannual commitments aimed at progressively reducing the structural agricultural surpluses and the relative intervention and refund expenditure.

On this point the Commission has already presented its proposals, and we assume that it is basing its own preliminary draft on these.

It is not our present task to discuss whether the Commission proposals could be accepted as they are or should be modified, but it is our duty here as a Parliament to say that they must, however, include a firm commitment with regard to their amount in 1982 and in the following years.

Turning at this juncture to Parliament itself, I wish to say that when, in a few weeks' time, we come to give our opinion on agricultural prices we must not become schizophrenic. We must be consistent with what we have decided concerning the budget. Only if the Commission and Parliament act in this way will we be able to make the Council of Agricultural Ministers appreciate the determination of Parliament, as a branch of the budgetary authority, and be able to back up our call for the conciliation procedure to be initiated were the Council to depart substantially from our requests.

The second move which we expect from the Commissions consists in presenting, without further delay, the formal proposal for a decision concerning the raising or the abolition of the ceiling on the amount of VAT income set aside for Community finances, in order to allow the Member States to ratify this as soon as possible. As a result of the culpable failure of the Jenkins Commission to keep its promise to present such a proposal, we will have to restrict payment appropriations in 1982 in order not to exceed the 'ceiling' of I%. But we cannot accept that commitment appropriations for the same year 1982, let alone those which will have to be entered in the 1982 budget for the following years, should depend on the absurd technicality that the 1 % VAT ceiling cannot be exceeded, rather than on a financial strategy.

Mr Thorn declared a month ago that, independently of the level which we will reach in 1982, a '1 % Community' rate is unacceptable. Well, gentlemen of the Commission, the moment of truth has come! No more than a week is needed to prepare a draft agreement quite simply amending or deleting the words 'one per cent' in the text of the present treaty on VAT revenue. After which, it will be for us to try and convince the Member States to accept this proposal. But up until now this has not been done.

The third move which we should like to be made in time for our debates is the production of a document indicating how the Community budget affects the national budgets, by how much it reduces them, and explaining why a possible increase in the Community budget greater than that in the national budgets is a stabilizing factor rather than an inflationary factor. You can have this document ready by the end of May, because for years you have been involved in an annual exercise on the coordination of national budgets, thanks to which you have data relating to the budgets of the Member States ready as early as the middle of April.

We are not asking for the publication of the document you submit to the Council, even though we would have the right to do so, but we ask you to extract from this information some leads for our own budget - leads which will silence once and for all the accusations constantly being directed at the Commission and Parliament that we spend public money without taking into account the austerity being imposed elsewhere in these difficult times.

The fourth move which we expect the Commission to make consists in making available to Parliament in good time not only the list of major priorities but also an indication of the order of magnitude of the sums involved in; these priorities is little more than empty words, if these are not accompanied by an indication of how much expenditure for such and such a policy is to go up or down in

comparison to the previous year.

To enable the Parliamentary committees to examine them seriously, so that Parliament can then give its opinion in plenary session without last-minute improvisation in the July debate on the preliminary draft, and to ensure that the Council knows that it will have to take them into account in preparing the draft budget, these figures will have to be available to us by the first half of April at the latest.

I have been told that this request has somewhat annoyed the Commission, which seems to be afraid of seeing its own right of initiative thereby diminished. I would like, first of all, to remind everyone that the report of the group of Commissioners presided over by Vice-President Ortoli and approved by the Commission a year ago states:

The paper on the assessment of budgetary problems will continue to be sent in March to the Joint Council of Foreign and Finance Ministers and tbe Parliament. The Commission will decide whether to include costed details in it, and if so, of what kind, wben it adopts the paper. Wben the Commission draws up the Preliminary draft budget following tbe usual timetable, it may take into account any remarks made by other institutions as a results of their discussion of the paper.

What we are asking of the Commission is that it finally decides to act in accordance with its own recommendations. Mr President, far from wishing to I diminish the right of initiative of the Commission, we intend to reinforce it by placing at its disposal a Parliament which has had every possibility to consider the Commission's reasoning and to pass judgment on it.

Taken as a whole, these four moves to be made prior to the preliminary draft mean that the Commission must act before it has concluded its review of Community policies requested by the Council for the end of June. If this date were to be kept to, it is cleat that the findings could not be incorporated into the preliminary draft which will be ready at the end of May. Parliament would therefore have to work until October on a document which did not even have a tentative value.

It is in fact only in October that the joint Council of Foreign and Finance Ministers could see the results of a Commission report produced at the end of June under the mandate of 30 May 1980.

Before concluding, I must emphasize that we are asking the Council in particular to decide to finally put an end, after years of delay, to its obstinate and unjustifiable opposition to the budgetization of loans taken up and granted, and to do this in such a way as not to affect Parliament's rights.

Finally, we consider that the time has come to put an end also to the liberty of the Council and the Commission to decide which expenditure is compulsory and which non-compulsory. This can only be decided through agreement between the three institutions, and if agreement is not reached between them, the only solution is to appeal to the Court which, on the basis of Article 177 of the EEC Treaty, shall have jurisdlction to give preliminary rulings concerning the interpretation' of Community law.

Mr President, on behalf of the Committee on Budgets, I ask Parliament to approve these guidelines. In this way we will have shown, I repeat, our determination to give serious consideration to the preliminary draft budget for 1982, without bitterness, but in full awareness of our responsibilities.