The European Parliament’s budgets committee will meet at 3pm tomorrow afternoon (4 December) to debate a budget compromise reached with member states last week. The MEPs will interrupt their meeting for a discussion among the leaders of the political groups in Parliament, who will decide whether the committee should vote on the compromise. 

Alain Lamassoure, the centre-right French MEP who chairs the budgets committee, has said that the two largest groups in Parliament – the centre-right European People’s Party and the centre-left Socialists and Democrats – both had problems with last week’s compromise.

MEPs had backed the European Commission in demanding a €9 billion top-up from the 2012 budget and a 2013 budget that can cover expected expenditure during the last year of the current multi-annual budget cycle. But the member states agreed only a €6bn top-up and a lower 2013 than demanded by the Commission and the Parliament. 

Negotiators from the Parliament, the Commission and the Council had last week agreed a compromise under which €6bn will be added to the 2012 budget – €3bn less than the Commission said was required to cover reimbursements legally owed to the member states – and a budget for 2013 of €150.9bn in commitments and €132.8bn in payments (instead of the Commission’s €151.1bn and €137.8bn).

Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, made it clear that there was no deal until Parliament had approved it, and called a meeting of the group leaders before the budgets committee’s vote, which was originally scheduled for today. 

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