Irish Regions Office Website

November 02, 2009

Leaked budget reform proposals: not in line with Lisbon Treaty?

The recent leaking of the Commission's first draft Communication on the reform of the EU Budget post-2013 has provoked a storm of controversy in Brussels and beyond. Three future EU spending priority areas are identified in the 'non-paper' - sustainable growth and jobs; sustainable resource management in a low-carbon society (energy and climate); and the EU's role in the world - but at a major implied cost to other areas of current spending.

As expected, the CAP is a target for reform and significant reduction with a refocus of single farm payments on agricultural products as 'public goods', and intensify spending on climate-related challenges to allow direct support for farmers in areas such as biodiversity and sustainable farming practices.

More surprisingly, another striking message of the document is directed at Regional Policy with the Commission apparently seeing cohesion-related issues as something more suited to being managed at national government level, and as being best achieved by an almost total concentration of resources on the 12 newer Member States - an approach previously mooted prior to the 2004 Enlargement. The draft also calls for Cohesion Policy to be closely integrated with rural development and maritime policies as well as national strategies, such as the Lisbon National Reform Programmes.

The proposals leave the future of spending on Competitiveness & Employment ('Objective 2') priorities - Ireland's main source of Structural Funding - in jeopardy. The draft poses questions as to the added value achieved from providing EU aid under individual national/regional Operational Programmes for purely internal consumption within wealthier parts of the Union as opposed to what is being and can be achieved by strengthening Territorial Cooperation (Interreg - Objective 3) which brings together regions from different Member States in joint actions. It hints that the mainstay of any future scaled-down Objective 2 may lie in providing a redistributive mechanism to address pronounced regional disparities within national jurisdictions.

These proposals have drawn the collective ire of organisations representing Europe's local and regional authorities who have reacted by suggesting that if implemented, ''they would challenge sustainable recovery and development in Europe'', ''do not reflect the goal of territorial cohesion, as introduced in the Lisbon Treaty'' and would ''ignore the demonstrable potential of integrated approaches at the territorial level'' in any given Community policy field by being overly-sectoral in focus.

The European Parliament's Budgets Committee has already questioned the appropriateness of an outgoing Commission bringing forward such ''provocative content''. Parliament will undertake hearings of all newly proposed Commissioners later in November. These issues are certain to crop up when the new Regional Policy and Budgetary Commissioners, in particular, present themselves.

Open letter from Assembly of European Regions

Posted by iroronan at November 2, 2009 12:56 PM