I went this afternoon to the EESC’s Budget Group, at the invitation of its Chairman, Vice-President Jacek Krawczyk, in order to listen in to the Group’s discussions about rapid follow-up to the recommendations in the European Parliament’s draft resolution on granting discharge for the 2010 budget and also to give the Group information on how the Committee’s administration is preparing for the austerity and reform measures that the European Commission has proposed and that are currently in the legislative pipeline. The donkey work is done for the 2013 budget drafting exercise, in the sense that the draft budget has been approved and sent off to the Commission. We must now await the outcome of the budgetary authority’s deliberations to know exactly what form our budget for next year will take but, whatever the outcome, there will still be two resource challenges ahead: the accession of Croatia, and the implementation of reforms that will include human resource reductions. My message to the Budget Group was a positive one. Both processes are well on track. The Committee is a mature institution and nowhere is that maturity more in evidence than in the efficient and consensual way in which it faces up to such challenges.
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