EU agrees 2014 budget

MEPs, member states and Commission reach compromise on annual budget.

Negotiators from the European Union’s main institutions have struck a deal on the Union’s budget for 2014.

The deal was reached after 15 hours of negotiations in the early hours of Tuesday (12 November).

The agreement makes €142.6 billion available for commitments to pay and €135.5bn in actual payments. Commitments are down 6.2% compared with the 2013 budget, and payments are down 6.5%.      

The negotiators from the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers and the European Commission also agreed where the money should come from to pay €400.5million in aid following natural disasters in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Romania, ending a quarrel that had threatened to derail Parliament’s endorsement of the EU’s long-term budget. €150m of that sum will now come out of the 2014 budget, with the balance – €250m – being paid from savings from the 2013 budget. 

The Parliament and the Council now have 14 days to give their formal endorsement of the annual budget. 

The agreed budget for next year is a compromise between the Parliament, which had been asking for more money, and the member states, which were seeking lower figures.

  

Alain Lamassoure, a centre-right French MEP who chairs the Parliament’s budgets committee, welcomed the agreement. “Parliament has taken its responsibility by accepting a lower budget,” he said. “But we managed to get the priorities right.”

Algimantas Rimkūnas, Lithuania’s deputy finance minister who spoke on behalf of the member states, said that the deal made additional money available for priority areas such as economic growth, jobs, innovation and humanitarian aid, but also migration, asylum and border control and financial supervision.

“At a time when many EU member states still face financial constraints, the agreed EU budget does not put more burden on their budgets and at the same time ensures that money is spent on the most important priorities such as youth employment and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises,” he said early this morning. “We have also managed to agree that there will be sufficient margins so that the EU is able to respond to unforeseen situations requiring additional expenditures.”

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