The EU's executive arm, the European Commission, will on November 3 issue growth forecasts for 2010 and 2011 for each country in the 27-nation bloc as well as the 16-country euro zone and EU at aggregate level.

The ministers, meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday, said they wanted all EU members to start reducing budget deficits if the forecasts showed growth was strengthening and self-sustaining.

Recession in some cases has inflated such gaps to more than four times the EU limit of 3 percent of GDP.

Ministers said it was still too soon to withdraw government help to the economy but a plan to roll back the stimulus measures at some point, such as 2011, was necessary to retain policy credibility with financial markets and consumers.

"Provided that the Commission forecasts continue to indicate that the recovery is strengthening and becomes self-sustaining, fiscal consolidation in all EU member states should start in 2011 at the latest," they said in the conclusions of their talks which were obtained by Reuters.

The conclusions said allowances should be made for country-specific circumstances because not all EU member states' economies would grow at the same pace. But countries already deep in debt should start consolidating next year, they said.

Greece, which after a change of government more than doubled its deficit forecast for this year to 12.5 percent of GDP -- and angered EU peers with the unreliability of its statistics -- said it would reduce the figure to single digits in 2010.

A previous EU deadline for Athens to bring the shortfall below 3 percent in 2010 was completely out of the question, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou told a news conference.

He said such a reduction could be possible in four years.

FRANCE SAYS NOV. 3 TOO SOON TO DECIDE

Most countries will have to make deficit cuts of much more than the minimum of 0.5 percent of GDP a year in structural terms envisaged by EU budget rules, the conclusions said.

But France, the euro zone's second-biggest economy, underlined the conditionality of the 2011 deadline on economic growth and said November 3 was too early to decide on deadlines.

"Exit strategies should be implemented in 2011 if the situation in terms of growth stabilizes ... There is an 'if'," French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde told reporters after a meeting of euro zone finance ministers on Monday evening.

"This has to be done gradually. It will be a bit too early to talk about it in November," Lagarde said.

British finance minister Alistair Darling said in a note to parliament that although exit strategies were important, the priority was to ensure the recovery was fully secured through fiscal support measures.

EU ministers have given Britain, which is likely to see a record deficit of 12 percent this year, until the fiscal year 2013/14 to bring it down to below the EU ceiling.

The British government, which faces a parliamentary election next year, has penciled in fiscal tightening from 2010/11 onwards. It wants to halve the budget deficit in the next four years.

France, like Spain and Poland, has until 2012 to cut its budget gap below 3 percent. But Paris expects the deficit to reach 8.2 percent of GDP in 2009 and rise further to 8.5 percent in 2010, making the 2012 deadline unrealistic. A presidential election is due in France in 2012.

Diplomats said euro zone ministers questioned Lagarde on Monday evening about France's lack of progress to meet the target. The European Commission will issue a report on how France has adhered to EU ministers' recommendations next month.

"France constitutes one of the major fiscal problems in the EU," an EU source close to the ministers' meeting said.

The European Commission has started disciplinary steps against 20 EU countries for running budget gaps above 3 percent.

(Writing by Jan Strupczewski; additional reporting by Mat Falloon in London; Editing by Dale Hudson and Timothy Heritage)