A “major conference” on the general reform of the EU budget will take place “in the autumn,” the European Commission has indicated, during which the results of the September 2007 public consultation will be presented, although the first proposals are only expected in 2009.

The conference had originally been scheduled to take place on 27 May. The Commission has attributed the delay to the insufficient number of responses, notably from member states. By mid-April, 227 contributions had been received, including 72 from the government sector in 17 out of 27 countries. The rest were from NGOs, the private sector, universities and civil society.

But certain MEPs are not convinced and see this rescheduling as a way to postpone this very sensitive debate to prevent it from interfering with the process of ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. “I am not going to comment on the reasons for this cancellation. The conference has been postponed until after 12 June [the day scheduled for the Irish referendum on the EU text],” Reimer Böge (EPP-ED, Germany), chairman of the Budgets Committee, said in April when the postponement was announced. The Irish ‘no’ has only added more need for this debate.

Alain Lamassoure (EPP-ED, France), responsible for the report on the reform of the Union’s own resources, harbours no doubts: “It is clear that during the period of treaty ratification, there are a certain number of subjects which the Commission wants to avoid, as do member states, so as not to create waves and delay or block the process”. He also realises that the proposals on which he has been working for the past two years, will have to wait even longer.

It was in December 2005, when the negotiations on the financial perspectives were finally concluded in the small hours of the morning, that the European Council mandated the Commission to “undertake a complete revision of all aspects of the Community budget (revenue and expenditure), including the Common Agricultural Policy, the British rebate and to produce a report in 2008-2009”. The Parliament was also involved in this revision on the revenue side of the budget, the EU’s own resources.

But progress today is almost at a standstill. The public consultation is the first stage of the reform process intended to find out the opinions of national, regional and local actors on issues such as the quality of expenditure, ways to improve the execution of the EU budget and the principles that must necessarily underpin the income side of the budget. The date proposed by the European Council was sufficiently vague to allow the Commission wide room for manoeuvre. Starting in the autumn, under the French Presidency, it could begin by dissecting the results of the consultation and presenting them to the public. Then, at the beginning of 2009 only, it could make proposals for a draft reform which will remain as political guidelines. There is no point in expecting a neatly tied-up package with clear elements on where to find the money, how to best use it or how big should the budget be. These questions will be for the next Commission to tackle, not before November 2009.

According to the European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget, Dalia Grybauskaité (Lithuania), the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty on 1 January 2009 could act as a “trampoline” for the budget reform. The text, in fact, proposes five key priorities for the future: freedom, justice and security, energy, the environment and climate change, research and technological development, and promotion of European values and interests globally. These areas could be used as a basis to define the new “expenditure priorities”.

The French Presidency will therefore not have to lead the debates on sensitive topics such as the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, or the gradual elimination of the corrective mechanisms such as the British rebate. In 2009, however, there will no longer be any way of avoiding them.