The co-rapporteurs of the European Parliament, Andrey Novakov (EPP, Bulgaria) and Constanze Krehl (S&D, Germany), have proposed an in-depth reform of the common provisions regulation for the forthcoming budgetary cycle, according to their draft report, of which EUROPE had sight on Monday 17 September. In particular, they change the overall budgetary volume of the cohesion policy, amend the funds covered by the regulation and change the co-financing rates.
The two MEPs suggest increasing the budget by 12% from €330 billion to €372 billion, to the benefit of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the Cohesion Fund (CF) and the European Social Fund plus (FSE+) in particular. The MEPs have chosen to leave the state-by-state allocation alone, but take the view that a fresh calculation will be necessary.
They propose increasing the envelope for the Cohesion Fund to €46.3 billion (from €41.3 billion in the Commission's proposal – see EUROPE 12029), that of the FSE+ to €99.8 billion in constant 2018 prices (from €88.6 billion) and the budget earmarked for European territorial cooperation to €11.1 billion (from €8.4 billion).
Additionally, the MEPs propose including the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) on the list of funds covered by the common provisions regulation, to maintain consistency between the funds.
In their amendments, they increase the EU co-financing rate for the least developed regions from 70% to 85%, from 40% to 60% for the most developed regions and from 55% to 60% for the transition regions. For the European Social Fund plus (FSE+), they suggest increasing the co-financing rate up to 90% in certain justified cases.
The MEPs furthermore remove any possibility of transferring funds from the Cohesion Policy into InvestEU, the successor to the Juncker Plan. Readers may recall that the European Commission allows member states to transfer up to 5% of their budgets between funds, whether they are under shared or direct management. However, the co-rapporteurs consider that this change could compromise the overall aims of the Cohesion Policy and propose restricting this new tax ability to benefit only the ERDF, CF and FSE+.
As for reinforcing the link between the Cohesion Policy and the 'European Semester' budgetary process, the two co-rapporteurs are very much against this and suggest that the suspensions be applied only to commitments and not payments.
Other significant amendments have been introduced, such as: - rebalancing the distribution of the envelope between the various objectives in favour of the 'Interreg' objectives, granting them around 3% of the overall budget; - introducing a European code of conduct on partnerships; - scrapping the decision to take €10 billion from the Cohesion Fund and transfer it to the Connecting Europe Facility; - earmarking 15% of the Commission's technical assistance budget for improving communication around the Cohesion Policy.
The co-rapporteurs are also keen to work quickly. Amendments must be submitted by no later than 15 October with a committee vote scheduled for 22 November.
At the Council, legislative work is still at the preliminary discussions stage in the working group, which is moving forward on the text by thematic 'blocs'. According to our information, the Austrian Presidency hopes to present an initial compromise text in early October and reach a general orientation before the end of its mandate. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)