§ Mr. Teddy Taylorasked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if it is his policy to continue to provide funds through the intervention board for export rebates and intervention buying, respectively, irrespective of the availability of funds from the Common Market for such purposes.
§ Mr. MacGregorThe Community regulations concerned are, of course, designed to deal with the normal situation in which funds are available from the Community budget to meet the expenditure which arises under the CAP and other Community policies, and the legal position in the case of exhaustion of the Community budget is far from clear. The issue of what would happen then is entirely hypothetical. The Commission is already taking steps to reduce expenditure without running into this sort of problem. There is nothing I can usefully add at this stage.