SOUTH
WEST FIRST
LETTER FROM STRASBOURG
OCTOBER 2000
THE MYSTERY REMAINS
The main
event on the agenda for this week was the first reading of the Budget.
This is a pretty important part of our work and I have to say
that the Budget Committee (or CoBu for insiders)
manages to surround the process with a lot of mystique.
So much so, that understanding it and being able to explain it is
not easy. This is the
seventh time I have participated in the annual vote and it still seems
shrouded in mystery.
PRIORITIES
& CHANGES
It starts
early in the calendar year with the Commission producing a preliminary
draft Budget. This goes to the Council of Ministers and the European
Parliament who are jointly the budgetary authority.
The Council goes through its discussions to reach a draft Budget
while the Parliament also works on a preliminary opinion. In addition to CoBu, all the Committees of the Parliament
which cover areas of expenditure appoint draughtsmen for opinions or
rapporteurs pour avis. At
this stage CoBu is gathering all these opinions to form a view as to
priorities and changes.
SERIOUS
BUSINESS
Around the
end of the summer the Council sends its draft Budget to the Parliament
and the serious business begins. However,
the Parliament only has an influence on the discretionary elements of
the Budget because expenditure on agriculture is excluded and that
amounts to roughly half the overall budget.
The rest divides into two categories of spending, the Commission
element which is everything except Administration or the running costs
of the various institutions of the EU.
Accordingly, two Rapporteurs are appointed to write the
Parliament response in the form of amendments to the Budget.
Of course it is much more complicated than that, but this should
be enough to give you the picture.
BALANCING
THE BUDGET
Unlike the
situation at home where the Government of the day can set public
expenditure at whatever level it chooses (providing it commands a
majority in Parliament) even if that means spending more than it
receives in tax and other revenue, the European Budget is subject to
restraints called the financial perspectives. These rules have to be agreed by all Member States and amount
to an upper limit of expenditure expressed as a percentage of overall
GDP (gross domestic product) of all fifteen countries.
Presently this is set at 1.27%.
Furthermore the budget must balance, there is no provision for
borrowing or the PSBR (public sector borrowing requirement) as we know
it in the UK.
BUDGET
CALCULATIONS
In
practical terms the Budget amounts to 95 billion euro or £55 billion at
todays conversion rate of around 58p per euro.
The UK budget alone is going on for seven times that much (sorry
but I don't have exact figures in the airport lounge where I'm writing
this), which should put the sums in perspective.
The revenue comes from tariffs and customs duties levied on
imports from outside or third countries (we would be the first country,
another member state a second country), a proportion of VAT revenues for
each member state, and a third component calculated on relative gdps of
member states called "own resources".
TECHNOLOGICAL
CONFUSION
So much
for background information. Travel
out was uneventful and almost on time (well I can't promise horror
stories all the time) which was just as well so I could tackle the pile
up of faxes and get on with my issues of the week.
However, I also had to grapple with a bit of new technology.
We have televisions in our offices so we can watch proceedings in
the Parliament, look at the notice board for details of meeting times
and locations and keep up with the news etc.
For the last year and a bit, we have been able to receive BBC
World on a channel in the teens but were never shown how to use the
remote control to get double digit channels (well we can't all be clever
clogs at everything) so I had to go up one at a time.
SHOWN
THE WAY
Now we
have a choice of four BBC channels, CNN and Sky News, but the French
services must have a sense of humour because the English Channels start
at 69 - which could mean an awful lot of button pushing to go that far.
The good news is that they told us how to get the right channel
(which has been frustrating me for some time trying to figure out the
answer), so I can go straight to BBC1, 2, World or the Parliament
channel. The reason we have
moved from first to last is maybe because UK is the fifteenth member
state in strict alphabetic order, but it could be a more sinister plot
by the French to put us in our place, who knows?
CO-ORDINATING
VOTES
From a
committee point of view the most important part of the week was voting
on the Rothe Report on a proposal from the Commission for a draft
directive on electricity from renewable energy sources or RES-E.
We had yet another extra-ordinary committee meeting on the
Tuesday evening to do the vote so the Report can come to the Plenary in
November. We held a couple
of meetings of EPP-ED (European Peoples Party-European Democrats, of
which we Conservatives are allied members) members of the committee in
an attempt to establish a common position before the vote.
As co-ordinator I had to steer a course
through it all.
DEFINITION
DIFFICULTY
The
greatest difficulty was in the definition of a renewable energy source,
a fairly critical matter to the whole directive.
For example hydro-electricity was in the original text as a
renewable source but only plant with a capacity of 10 megawatts or less
could be eligible for support (eurospeak for a subsidy).
For example, a number of categories of agricultural and forest
waste were listed as renewable, yet my attempt to add energy from waste
as a looser definition to include dry household waste and, possibly,
methane gas from landfill sites was not universally supported, because
it could be taken to include organic wastes (which should be composted
and re-cycled) and plastics of one sort or another (which come from oil
and that is not viewed as a renewable source).
Another addition to the list was peat provided it did not exceed
its net annual increment (in Sweden and Finland it is evidently
increasing faster than it is being extracted).
MEETING
TARGETS
Other
issues of importance were whether targets set for each member state
could be binding, how long support regimes should be left in place and
who pays the cost of connection to the grid.
The targets are ambitious. First
that 12% of all energy consumed should be from R.E.S. (this target was
adopted some years ago) and that means that 22.1% of electricity should
be from R.E.S.
PLEASING
EVERYBODY
The point
is that there is no competence or legal base in the Treaty for the EU to
tell member states what to do in the energy field, so any text which
attempts to do so, could be challenged in the court.
Better to encourage and avoid problems.
Some think that ten years is long enough for subsidies, others
that five years more appropriate. And,
of course, the right of access to the grid is not worth much to a wind
farm in some exposed part of the Outer Hebrides, if the cost of linking
up with the mainland grid is:-
a)
prohibitive and
b)
must be paid by the wind farm.
Equally to
lay a duty on the grid to pay all connection costs for any and every RES-E
generating plant would be unfair, and open to charges of unfair
competition.
COMMON
SENSE OVER-RULED
The voting
in committee did not go as well as I had hoped.
Our capacity to impose common sense on the left alliance of
Socialists, Greens and Communists was constrained by the five Liberal
members displaying a classic characteristic of people of that ilk,
namely splitting and voting both ways.
We shall have to try again with re-introducing certain amendments
at the plenary stage.
LIGHT
RELIEF
After an
hour and a half of putting my arm up (and I have to do it every time, be
it for, against or abstain, to give the voting indication to my
colleagues in the whip part of a co-ordinators role), I turned to a
Friends of Music event with some relief.
This turned out to be a very good do with sit down dinner and
entertainment afterwards by the Corrs, an Irish group that my daughter
tells me are cool. They
were pretty good, and I even recognised some of the tunes.
Yes, we do have some perks now and again, but I don't feel too
bad about it, after a full day of wall-to-wall meetings.
MEETINGS
GALORE
Wednesday
was another day of meetings as well as voting.
The BBC and the ITC were keen to put their views on the Telecoms
package because it affects them. The
European Association of Consumer Electronics Manufacturers wanted to
talk about the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive, but
I missed them owing to something else running over.
I attended a meeting of our WTO (World Trade Organisation)
working party with Commissioner Lamy where he discussed China's
accession to the WTO and the proposal known as 'everything but arms',
whereby the EU should give open access to its markets to the poorest 46
countries in the world. This
seems a splendid idea to me and even more so when I start getting calls
from the sugar lobby, worried that their cosy regime may be upset by
competition from these poor countries.
Interesting times.
FRENCH
HOSPITALITY
I also
looked in on the Forestry seminar but can't stay long enough to get the
gist. I hear more over
dinner courtesy of the French ONF or Office National des Forets.
We were taken in a bus way out into the forest to a restaurant
seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
My french improved a bit!
COMPROMISE
SOLUTION
Thursday
was a Budget vote day. This
used to be a very long process in the old days, so I am told, when every
amendment had to be voted separately.
Nowadays the CoBu make them into blocks for ease and speed.
However this year two interest groups were intent on changing
things. One was us because a group of my Conservative colleagues put
down some 400 amendments at committee stage aimed at cutting expenditure
and reforming practices. Most
were lost at that stage, but we threatened to resubmit for plenary.
This attracted some scorn from a wide circle of MEPs and in the
event because of the argument that we would be adding hours and much
expense to the process, we cut back to 30 or so.
FAST
WORK IN THE CHAIR
The other
'interest' was the Agriculture Committee which had quite a few
amendments aimed at more expenditure and subsidy.
They look to the interests of their client group and why not,
farmers are not exactly having an easy time of it.
However in this instance it meant that they became more the
villains of the piece than we Conservatives.
In the event the vote took just an hour thanks to fast work in
the Chair and some cunning procedural device which prevented most of the
dissenting amendments being voted at all.
Oh, I nearly forgot to say that our French President of the
Parliament was in the Chair. Funny
thing that!
SUPERSTITIOUS
GESTURE
Something
happened before the vote that took me back to the bad old days of the
last Parliament when the Socialists and the Greens indulged in gimmicky
gesture politics with props like posters and banners and wacky costumes.
This time all the Greens smuggled yellow green umbrellas into the
hemicycle and put them up at the beginning of business.
It was a protest about climate change issues.
What gets me, in addition to deploring such schoolboy antics, is
whether these people know that it is bad luck to open an umbrella
indoors.
LIFE
CARRIES ON
Something
else didn't happen this week. There
were no urgencies. What
bliss! And, so far as I can
tell, the world carried on regardless.
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