Brussels, 30/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - During its debate on Thursday 26 March, the regional affairs committee of the European Parliament criticised the conditionality established between cohesion policy and economic governance.
Conditionality was introduced in the final version of the regulation governing the use of European funds. Article 23 stipulates that “the Commission may request a member state to review and propose amendments to its partnership agreement and relevant programmes, when this is necessary to support the implementation of relevant Council recommendations or to maximise the growth and competitiveness impact … in member states receiving financial assistance".
In practical terms, the procedure is two-phased: the Commission begins through a reprogramming request (§1), then, if there is no “effective action”, recommends that the Council suspend up to 50% of payments (§6). This recommendation “shall be deemed adopted”, unless a qualified majority is obtained against it within a one-month timescale (§10).
The European Parliament is preparing an own initiative report criticising Article 23. The rapporteur, José Blanco Lopez (S&D, Spain) pointed out that the EPP and S&D initially opposed its being included in the regulation. However, according to a parliamentary source, the Council refused to remove it during the trialogue discussions. The chair of the Parliamentary committee and the president of the Parliament therefore had the text put to the vote as a single unit, forcing MEPs to accept the contested article.
Stanislav Polcak (Czech Republic), shadow rapporteur for the EPP, said that Article 23 “could have a disproportionate impact on the regions”. He called for a more precise formulation of the criteria to be used by the Commission to activate this Article and wondered whether the two included in the text (follow-up on a Council recommendation, and maximising the effects on growth) should be understood as an exhaustive list or not. Ruza Tomasic (Croatia), shadow rapporteur for the ECR Group, underlined that “the local authorities are not usually responsible for national debt”. She spoke at some length about the problems that fund reprogramming could raise given that “member states need stability”. Martina Anderson (GUE/NGL, United Kingdom) asserted that this Article was “an attack on the sovereignty of member states” and a threat to the poorest countries. She also wanted to know what the result of suspension of payments to the weakest regions would be and said that this could only make the situation worse.
Rosa d'Amato (EFDD, Italy) concluded the debate by describing Article 23 as a distortion of the subsidiarity principle and repeated that the regions should not be penalised for the budgetary behaviour of their states. She also underlined the contradiction between this regulation and the Commission communication of last January, which called for greater budgetary flexibility (see EUROPE 11229).
Lambert van Nistelrooij (EPP, Netherlands) was the only MEP to have adopted a more measured position, stating that it was necessary to wait and see “implementation in the long term” of the controversial Article. ALDE could give the follow-up of this dossier to Olli Rehn, former European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs.
Representatives of DGs ECFIN and REGIO attended the discussions. The former acknowledged that the regulation gave “the European Commission a certain discretionary power”. The latter asserted that “it is not Article 23 that is harming the regions but economic policies that are unhealthy. There cannot be any growth in the regions without good decision-making in economic governance".
Reader may recall that the Committee of the Regions also opposed Article 23 stating that, “reprogramming and freezing structural funds are incompatible with the new EU strategy for growth”. (Jean Comte)