Brussels, 15/01/2013 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament is nudging the European Commission to provide more details on how the role of territorial development is to be included in the context of Cohesion Policy reform.
The relevant proposal for a resolution put forward by Derek Vaughan (S&D, UK) was adopted by the European Parliament meeting in plenary session on Tuesday 15 December. MEPs stress that the Commission should clarify, during the implementation phase, its proposals on local development by local players, and they are now looking forward to the publication of a guide on local development strategies conducted by local players, for management authorities. The rapporteur alludes to many good practices in his resolution, such as: integrated regional investment in suburban areas of Manchester, an authority responsible for the management of structural funds in Wales, and the delegation of tasks by regional authorities to local authorities in the Netherlands.
The day before the vote, Vaughan said that, as part of its reform of cohesion policy, the Commission had presented proposals for partnership agreements on multi-level governance, a code of conduct, etc. “I believe that these are all good ideas”, he said, but “we need to find ways and mechanisms of actually putting these good ideas into place, allowing local authorities and regions to bring these five funds together to fund major projects in the future”.
In its report, the EP gives its support to the proposals for joint action plans, which would allow groups of projects to benefit from funding from several operational programmes at the same time. There too, the rapporteur calls on the Commission for more details on joint action plans and their degree of integration. The same is true for integrated regional investment proposals, which would direct funding to urban areas.
The commissioner responsible for cohesion policy, Johannes Hahn, said he was grateful that the resolution raises questions for the Commission in this way, but he did not give any answers when taking the floor at the European Parliament. (MD/transl.jl)