PURPOSE: to mobilise the Contingency Margin in 2020 to provide emergency assistance to Member States and further reinforce the Union Civil Protection Mechanism/rescEU in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
PROPOSED ACT: Decision of the European Parliament and of the Council.
BACKGROUND: Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 1311/2013 established a Contingency Margin of up to 0.03 % of the Gross National Income of the Union in order for the EU-28 to react to unforeseen circumstances as a last resort instrument. In the technical adjustment of the MFF for 2020, based on Article 6 of the MFF Regulation, the absolute amount of the Contingency Margin for the year 2020 is set at EUR 5 096.8 million.
The Commission submitted Draft Amending Budget (DAB) No 2/2020 which includes an overall increase of commitment appropriations for heading 3 Security and Citizenship of EUR 3 000 million to cover the re-activation of the Emergency Support Instrument (ESI) within the Union to help Member States tackle the consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak and to further reinforce the Union Civil Protection Mechanism/rescEU so as to facilitate wider stock-piling and coordination of essential resource distribution across Europe. This increase complements other reinforcements that concerned the same heading for an overall amount of EUR 423.3 million already proposed by the Commission in DAB No 1/2020.
Having regard to this very particular situation, the last-resort condition set out in Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 1311/2013 is fulfilled.
CONTENT: the Commission proposes, as a last resort, to mobilise EUR 714.6 million through the Contingency Margin to cover the additional needs related to the reactivation of the ESI. The MFF Regulation requires that amounts made available through the mobilisation of the Contingency Margin shall be fully offset against the margins for the current or future financial years.
The amounts offset shall not be further mobilised in the context of the MFF so that the total ceilings of commitment and payment appropriations laid down in the MFF for the current and future financial years shall not be exceeded. Consequently, the mobilisation of the Contingency Margin for commitment appropriations in 2020 under headings 3 and the related offsetting have to respect the total commitment ceiling for the year 2020, the last year of the current MFF period.
The Commission proposes to offset the proposed reinforcement of expenditure under heading 3 against the unallocated margin available under the expenditure ceiling of heading 5 Administration.
After the offsetting, margins for a total of EUR 633.7 million would still remain under the expenditure ceiling of the following headings:
No margin would remain available under the other expenditure ceilings. In addition, the overall commitment ceiling for the whole MFF would remain unchanged.
This Decision should enter into force on the same day as the amendment of the 2020 budget given that the Contingency Margin allows the financing of some actions over and above the ceiling set for the 2020 budget in the MFF.