Debate: General budget of the European Union for the financial year  – all sections
Date: WEDNESDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2020
Speaker: Johannes Hahn
Language: EN

Let me first congratulate all of you on the political agreement concerning the Multiannual Financial Framework, which we all could reach just yesterday. Indeed, it required serious compromises on both sides, but it came just in time, and it shows that the Union is ready to act. This unprecedented agreement is historic both in size and magnitude. At times, when the epidemiological situation is worsening, and economic forecasting is predicting challenging times for our companies, citizens and regions. This demonstrates the Union’s ability to act. As you know, the MFF is a pre-condition for having the annual budget and all the programmes adopted. Ultimately, the envelopes for Union programmes depend on the final agreed MFF ceilings.  The Commission will therefore work tirelessly to introduce the budgetary impact of the MFF agreement in the annual budget procedure as quickly as possible.  We were just about to conclude our work on the amending letter but now we are happy to finalise it taking the MFF agreement into account.  I hope that this will enable us to swiftly come to an agreement on the 2021 budget in the conciliation. I think we can all agree that recent agreements should not directly be re-opened, especially considering the sweat and tears that went into this MFF agreement.  Concerning the budget nomenclature, we have, at the technical level, worked proactively with the Parliament and the Council to find the right balance between flexibility and transparency. The amending letter will provide proposals, which should meet the main concerns. On the substance of the Council and the Parliament position, I would like to address one issue also raised by State Secretary Hagedorn last time when we met in this Chamber few weeks ago. This concerns the proposal to reduce 162 posts in the Commission’s establishment plan of which 140 posts relate to staff increases in the Union’s decentralised agencies.  While we fully share the objective to ensuring the efficiency of our administration, I simply cannot accept the rationale in offsetting increases in posts for decentralised agencies by cutting Commission posts. The decentralised agencies work in areas where Member States agree that resources are better pooled for activities that would otherwise have to be performed by national administrations: border control or food safety are just two examples. The Commission doesn’t perform these tasks and the pooling of national activities in the decentralised agencies has no impact on the workload within the Commission. Therefore, I urge the Council and the Parliament to reconsider their position on this.  Let me just remind you of the next steps in the annual budgetary procedure. Firstly, we will present the aforementioned amending letter by the end of this week. Secondly, we will also present the executability letter in the coming days. It’s one of the Commission’s inputs for the conciliation. The executability letter provides the assessment of the implementability of the amendments proposed by the Parliament and the Council.  I am now fully confident that, after reaching the difficult and important MFF compromise, we will also be able to agree on how to translate it into the 2021 budget.  There’s no margin for failure in the draft budget 2021 calendar. The conciliation, which starts this coming Tuesday, 17 November, is our one and only shot to find an agreement on the next annual budget. Now, the negotiating teams will, with their political agreement on the MFF, pave the way to an agreement on the 2021 budget as well.  We have only these 21 days until December 7 to reach an agreement. So I trust we all understand the heavy responsibility that this places on everyone, because what is an MFF without an annual budget?  Let’s make every single day count and work together proactively and constructively. This is critical if we want the Union’s response to the crisis to continue at full force next year.  I have to say my services and I are available at all times to help this process because, once again, we cannot lose any time and it’s our one and only last shot, if you like, and this is something which has to be fixed in due time in order to really to enable us, starting on 1 January next year to implement what is necessary in the interest of our citizens.