EU, over 2.2 million spent in 2023 to answer parliamentary questions

Brussels – What is the cost of answering questions MEPs submit to the European Commission? A lot. It reaches millions of euros in a single year: in 2023 alone, the estimate is slightly over 2.2 million. Ireland’s Clare Daly (the Left), not re-elected in last June’s European elections, asked for an account of the cost of politics and democracy, with her request answered by Executive Vice-President Maros Šefčovič.

First, the obligatory premise: the calculations do not regard specific salaries. They consider the various tasks and duties of each commissioner and Commission official and how many working hours it takes, on average, to devote oneself exclusively to answering questions from MEPs. Overall, in 2023, the working time spent on getting to the point of ‘finessing’ the answer to send to those in charge amounted to an average remuneration of 627 euros per question, including email exchanges, hours worked, and translation costs. Calculating that in 2023 alone, the Commission received 3,607 questions, the arithmetic count is soon done: in a single year, the cost of democracy reached 2,261,589 euros.

The cost corresponds to 16 European full-time equivalents used to prepare replies to members of the other EU institution, Šefčovič explains. “The Commission does not have dedicated staff, who are engaged only to respond to written parliamentary questions, but that the work is spread across services depending on the subject matter and complexity of a parliamentary question.” After all, no one question, in terms of subject, content, type of information, and clarification requested, is the same as another, and having to circulate the question to multiple offices and directorate-general becomes necessary if one wants to offer a worthwhile answer.

The figure on the cost of answering questions from MEPs is ‘updated to 2015’, Šefčovič’s notes. Therefore, it was calculated using a methodology from ten years ago. Considering inflation and the cost of living, the estimate made in Brussels could even exceed the estimated 2.2 million.