Committees focus on European Semester

The European Semester is the focus of work for the committees on Economic and Monetary Affairs, Budgets and Employment on Tuesday, as MEPs meet their national counterparts to discuss economic coordination work going on at EU level and how parliaments can better hold the various decision makers to account.

29-1-2013 — /europawire.eu/ — European Parliament Budgets Committee Chair Alain Lamassoure (EPP, FR), called for a proper discussion of what can be expected from the EU budget.

“Ireland’s population of Ireland makes up less than 1% of the EU total, and Greece’s GNP is less than 2% of that of the EU as a whole. Yet their budgetary problems have kept us busy for a long time, he said, pointing out that EU member states’ national budgets are interdependent.

He also called for a genuine EU “own resources” system to make the Union less dependent upon contributions from national budgets (which currently account for 85%).

The EU budget should not be seen as a  “burden” on national budgets, but “a means to do things more cheaply by doing them together”, said MEP Anne Jensen (ALDE, DK), who will steer next year’s EU budget through Parliament.”In Denmark we save money on the diplomatic service now that we have the European External Action Service”, she explained.

Ms Jensen criticised the compromise proposal circulating among member states for the EU’s long-term budget (2014-2020). “This implies that we would have the same budget in 2020 as we had in 2008”, she said. Like Mr Lamassoure, she made the case for a budget that is sufficiently flexible to deal with changing circumstances.

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