- Like all other public bodies in Europe, the EU needs to cut the cost of its bureaucracy. For example, by eliminating agencies and committees that duplicate work or provide no real purpose (such as the Committee of the Regions), more than €700m could be saved in 2011 alone. The EU should also abolish the two-seat Parliament for the European Parliament, saving roughly €200m a year. The European Commission could also cut down on its own DGs. For example, DG Culture should not have more people employed than DG Internal Market as is currently the case. The Commission could also cut its spending on “communication” and “citizenship” initiatives which tend to be biased towards more integration and out of step with what most taxpayers want their money to be spent on.   

- Regional spending should be repatriated for the EU's richer member states (i.e. member states with GDP of 90% or above), a move which could save billions as a result of better targeting, absorption of funds and less of an administrative cost. At the moment, 60% of the absorbed funds go to the EU-15. Does it make sense for the UK, France, Sweden, etc., to send each other money via Brussels, costing a lot of money which was meant to help poor regions? This would also allow the funds to be better tailored around the genuinely poorer countries and regions in the EU. It would also be easier to control the spending (hence reducing mismanagement and fraud) as the scheme is then slimmed down with clearer objectives.  Furthermore, there is little evidence that structural funds are having much impact on the EU-15 (with some exceptions). As the OECD has argued, the rate of "convergence" between poorer and richer regions in the EU is very slow. At the current rate it would take 170 years to halve divergence across the regions in the EU.
 
- There should be a complete overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). That more than 40% (€60bn) of spending remains focussed on agriculture and supporting European farmers, raising prices with little economic benefit in return while harming farmers in the developing world is unacceptable.  The CAP should be reduced so it only provides some cross-border funding for research in the farming sector and perhaps measures to cope with environmental issues (i.e. axis 2 of Pillar II under the current CAP). CAP funds could instead be channelled towards real value added R&D in energy, medicine, etc., although there needs to be better checks in place on EU spending towards large scale, cross-border infrastructure and development projects so as to avoid fiasco’s like the Galileo project. 

Most of this is common sense. Why not just implement it?

Pieter Cleppe is the Head of the Brussels office of Open Europe, a think tank contributing bold new thinking to the debate about the direction of the EU.