On Monday 25 September, the European Parliament's committee on budgetary control called upon the EU and its member states to redouble their efforts to secure better results in tackling youth unemployment.
In its adoption (15 votes to 1 and 3 abstentions) of the draft own-initiative report by Derek Vaughan (S&D, UK) on the monitoring of expenditure and the cost-efficiency ratio of the youth guarantee systems of the EU, the budgetary control committee calls for the main priority to be laid on 'NEETs' – young people not in employment, education or training.
The MEPs also call for: - extra money to be taken from the national budgets and the European Social Fund to help young people; - public employment services to be more effective in their support to young people most struggling to find work; - member states to improve the quality of employment, education and training available to young people; - the Commission and the member states to set in place a control system to evaluate progress made; - the Commission to provide more specific information and an annual report on the cost-efficiency ratio of the youth guarantee and how the implementation of the programme is monitored at member state level.
The youth guarantee and the youth employment initiative were set in place in 2013. Between 2014 and 2020, they will have made more than €8 billion in European funding available to tackle youth unemployment. However, the MEPs regret the fact that one in five young people in the EU was still out of work in mid-2016. In Greece and Spain, this figure is still above 40%.
The Parliament will vote on Vaughan's report at the plenary session in Strasbourg on 23-26 October.
According to the European Commission, the youth employment initiative has directly supported more than 1.4 million young people since 2013. Since 2014, 16 million young people have benefited from the youth guarantee. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)