The European commission is to spend tens of millions more pounds on promoting the ideal of the EU citizen under plans drawn up by officials in Brussels in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Officials for the European parliament claim there is now a “clear need” for a significant increase in spending on the Europe for Citizens programme, which aims to foster the notion of an EU citizenry through remembrance events, town twinning and involvement in European parliamentary elections. The programme had its budget cut from €215m to €185.5m after a request from Britain in 2013.

“Considering the current political climate, in which an increasing number of citizens question the foundations of the EU, decisive action is indispensable,” an assessment of the programme by officials in the European parliament reports.

“It is for this reason that the reduction in funding for the EFC programme is a serious handicap to successful implementation: to reiterate, the budget for the current EFC programme is €185.5m (down from €215m under the previous programme), which amounts to merely 0.0171% of the EU multiannual financial framework.”

The aim of EFC is said to be that of developing “a better understanding” of the EU across all its member states, to fund remembrance events for key moments in European history and foster the ideal of European citizenship. The assessment document says that funding “which promotes and enables citizens to engage in European matters is of vital importance, especially in times when Euroscepticism is on the rise”.

It adds: “A reduction was requested by the United Kingdom government, as is apparent from a report of the UK House of Commons’ European scrutiny committee regarding the EFC programme 2014-2020, and backed in the council.

“The latter report states that ‘in his letter of 31 October 2013, the minister for culture, communications and creative industries (Ed Vaizey) informed us that the government had succeeded in securing a reduction in the budget of the programme (down from €229m in the commission’s original proposal to €185m)’...

“The reduced funding has undoubtedly entailed serious consequences for the functioning of the EFC programme as a whole.”

In 2015, from 2,800 applications for cash, 408 projects were selected for grants: 252 town twinning citizens meetings, 33 remembrance projects, 32 networks of twinned towns and 27 civil society projects.

Hungary had the greatest number of successful applications for cash (17%) followed by Slovakia (13%) and Italy and Germany (11%).

Earlier this month it emerged that Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was preparing a timetable setting out steps to create EU military structures “to act autonomously” from Nato. Mogherini reportedly said: “We have the political space today to do things that were not really do-able in previous years.”

The military plan would see countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland forming permanent military structures to act on behalf of the EU and for the deployment of the EU’s battle groups and 18 national battalions.

However, the British defence secretary Michael Fallon said he would veto any “common military force” as long as the UK was a member state of the EU. The European Council president Donald Tusk said Theresa May had told him during their meeting at Downing Street last week that she would be ready to trigger Article 50 to begin Brexit by February 2017.