MEPs want to decrease the overall size of Parliament after the U.K. leaves the bloc, with the U.K.'s remaining seats reallocated among member states | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images MEPs propose cut in their ranks after Brexit European Parliament lawmakers put forward plan to deal with seats vacated by departing Brits.

MEPs want to shrink the size of the European Parliament after Britain leaves the EU, and opened the door for a future pan-European list of lawmakers, according to a draft report obtained by POLITICO.

The U.K. has 73 MEPs who will be leaving because of Brexit. Under the proposal, drawn up by the Constitutional Affairs Committee, 51 of those seats would be cut in 2019, taking the overall size of the Parliament down from 751 to 700. The remaining 22 British seats would be re-distributed among the remaining 27 EU countries.

The other 51 seats would be held in reserve and could be used to create pan-European list of MEPs and for MEPs from new member countries as a result of “potential future enlargements” of the EU.

The committee will discuss the proposal in Strasbourg on September 11 and will vote on it at a later date before it passes on to a plenary session of all MEPs, although no dates for the votes have been set. National capitals would also have to sign off on the plan.

The new distribution of seats would apply “once there is legal certainty and the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the union becomes legally effective,” the report said.

Even before the Brexit vote, the Parliament struggled to find a fair way to allocate seats. The larger (and more important) the country, the greater the number of MEPs it gets. The allocations were tweaked before the 2014 election to make room for Croatia, which joined the bloc in July 2013.

The committee's proposal, which comes after months of discussion between political groups, proposes a re-distribution that would prevent any EU country from losing representation while using “only a minimal fraction of the seats vacated by the U.K," the report said.

Proponents of the idea of creating a pan-European list of lawmakers — with candidates representing a single European constituency — include the Italian government and French President Emmanuel Macron, who incorporated the idea into his presidential program and called for “about 50 seats” to be set aside.

Critics, including the largest group in the Parliament — the European People's Party — charge that a pan-European list is an unrealistic and federalist whim that would require a treaty change. They believe such a list would further deepen the gap between EU citizens and politicians.

Paulo Rangel, a Portuguese MEP who is vice president of the EPP and a member of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, said transnational lists were “well-regarded” by Socialist and Liberal MEPs. He said the legal framework for setting up such a list had been in the hands of the Council since 2015.

“Until the framework comes into force ... the transnational list will always be an idea without foundation. It will always be soft law,” Rangel said.

The idea of a pan-European list first emerged in a 2011 report by former British MEP Andrew Duff, who proposed that an additional 25 MEPs be elected by a single constituency “formed of the whole territory of the European Union.” His proposal was approved in the Constitutional Affairs Committee at the time but the full Parliament refused to back it.