Juncker presents slimmed-down priorities for 2015

Rollout of the €315 billion investment plan is at the top of the European Commission's list of priorities for 2015, its President Jean-Claude Juncker announced on Tuesday (17 December) before the last gathering of the European Parliament for 2014.

Also high on the Commission’s agenda for the next 12 months are continued steps to establish single digital and energy markets, and additional weight behind achieving a transatlantic trade agreement with the US.

In total, the Commission will pursue only 23 new legislative bills over the year. Copyright reform will be the main item in the digital arena and revision of the EU Emissions Trading System will feature in energy plans. Juncker has also pledged to review the contentious rules around genetically modified crops (GMOs).

In an early stab at spring cleaning, the Commission also made public a list of 80 legislative bills that will either face the chop or will go back to the drawing board. The ‘kill list’ did not contain any pulled science or research proposals.

 “Just because an issue is important doesn’t mean that the EU has to act on it,” Juncker’s colleague and first vice-president, Frans Timmermans, told the assembly’s politicians (MEPs). 

The €315 investment fund, which the Commission has said will stimulate spending for research infrastructures around Europe, will be presented to the EU's heads of government for their approval during a European Council meeting in Brussels on 18 and 19 December.

€1 billion cuts to research averted

Besides hearing the Commission’s plans for the next year, MEPs voted in favour of a revised 2015 budget deal, with one vote ensuring a crippling €1 billion budget cut to research, on the table for the past few months, was avoided.

“It’s close to being a Christmas miracle,” said Christian Ehler, a German MEP, on the 11th-hour compromise reached last week. “It was really the Parliament that pushed this one to a good conclusion.”

In fact, Parliament negotiators obtained an additional €45 million more for Horizon 2020, the EU’s research programme, in 2015. The breakdown amounts have not yet been published, so it is unclear which budget lines will benefit.

“We secured a substantial amount to ease the strain on contractors, like small and medium sized enterprises,” said Eider Gardiazábal Rubial, a Spanish MEP and main draftsman from the Parliament on the 2015 budget bill.

Each year the European Commission finds itself with far more bills than money to pay them, leaving European governments , which spent the last few months poring over the EU’s budget for next year, threatening a €1 billion cut in the research budget.

All sides in the negotiation failed to reach a deal in November as cost-conscious governments came under heavy domestic pressure to hold down a Brussels bureaucracy viewed by voters as profligate.

Following a period of intensive discussions between parliament representatives and ministers, it was announced last week that the proposed cuts to research had been withdrawn – the result, in no small part, of a campaign from researchers and scientists over the last few months, calling for research funds to be protected. The cuts will now affect other areas of the EU’s annual budget.

A€1 billion cut would have been likely to result in the Commission failing in its contractual obligations to thousands of scientists who have applied for funding through Horizon 2020.

2015 legislative initiatives here
EU budget 2015 press release here