Following several votes, Regional Development Committee are set to start talks with Member States on the EU's post-2013 cohesion policy. Among the conclusions reached by MEPs ahead the negotiations with the Council, they stressed that regional policy funding should not depend on Member States' budget discipline.

After Regional Development Committee's votes on mandates to negotiate the legislative package proposals, MEPs are set to start talks with Member States on the EU's post-2013 cohesion policy. In June 2011, the European Parliament defended already the current architecture of EU structural funds. Among the agreements reached, MEPs backed plans to use "partnership contracts" to determine how structural funding is used within member states. Regional and local authorities must be involved in setting up these contracts from the earliest possible stage, in line with the multi-level governance approach.

In addition, they agreed in principle to plans to ring-fence funding for the Europe 2020 strategy's thematic areas, but asked for more flexibility to set the programmes' objectives. However, MEPs deleted from the regulation the Commission's controversial macroeconomic conditionality proposal, under which payments to regions could be suspended, which would penalise them for the lack of budgetary discipline of their Member State.

Regional Development Committee also agreed on a new concept of the "urban dimension" of cohesion policy and said that regions should be enabled to choose one extra objective from the Europe 2020 list in the Commission proposal. Parliament's negotiators will talk to the Council and the Commission over the summer.