In Budapest on Friday 2 February, the Visegrad Group, Croatia and Romania signed a common declaration calling for an ambitious post-2020 Cohesion Policy with a sufficient budget, focussing on shared management, simplification and flexibility.
There are a raft of proposals. The signatory member states say they are prepared to consider a rise in the next EU budget above the level of 1% of European gross national income (GNI).
This would align with the European Commission’s proposal, which considers a rise in the upper limit of EU budget spending to between 1.1% and 1.2% of GNI (see EUROPE 11934), and the view of the European Parliament and Committee of the Regions, which want a rise of up to 1.3% of GNI (see EUROPE 11944).
As for the future Cohesion Policy itself, the signatories call for local and national priorities and territorial specificities to be taken into account in thematic concentrations and want greater flexibility in the reprogramming of targets at national and regional levels. The document supports the idea of shared management and calls for the current co-financing levels to continue. The six member states feel that the Cohesion Policy should remain a subsidising policy that is better meshed with financial instruments.
The countries support the idea of a single, controlled audit for implementation of the Structural and Investment Funds in respect of subsidiarity. In this regard, the signatories stress the importance of simplifying the funding rules in the next budget. Finally, the document clearly backs ‘European value-added’ for European territorial cooperation, but calls for an exemption for state aid rules for these programmes.
The common declaration can be found in English at: http://bit.ly/2FGlEm9 (Original version in English by Pascal Hansens)