The Recovery and Resilience Facility, the budgetary instrument at the heart of the European Recovery Plan, should finance projects with “real European added value” in six sectors: green transition, digital transformation, economic cohesion and competitiveness, social cohesion and administrative capacity, say Eider Gardiazabal (S&D, Spain), Siegfried Mureșan (EPP, Romania) and Dragoș Pîslaru (Renew Europe, Romania) in their draft report published on Tuesday 1 September.
According to the agreement of the European Council, the Facility will be endowed with €672.5 billion over the period 2021-2024, of which €312.5 billion will be in the form of grants to Member States and €360 billion in the form of loans (see EUROPE 12532/2).
Each Member State will be required to prepare a recovery plan detailing the projects and measures it wishes to implement, how its plan responds to the country-specific recommendations addressed to it annually by the European level, and the milestones for monitoring the progress of the national plan. According to the draft report, projects and measures initiated from February 2020 and directly related to the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic should be eligible.
MEPs want the Commission to approve the national plans within two months of their submission. In their view, these plans and the related tranches of financial assistance should be validated by means of delegated acts of the Commission, which place the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on an equal footing.
The three rapporteurs, on behalf of the Parliament Committees on Budgets and Economic and Monetary Affairs, want the Commission to produce quarterly, rather than annual, reports on the implementation of the national plans, in order to be kept informed. Parliament reserves the right to invite national officials to hearings by the relevant parliamentary committees to take stock of the state of play of a national recovery plan.
Dashboard. Above all, in the interests of public transparency, the three rapporteurs suggest setting up a public scoreboard summarising all the relevant information on the national plans and enabling the European Recovery Plan to be regularly updated.
In order to ensure the visibility of the Facility, a specific label could be created to inform the public that a project is funded under the European Recovery Plan, following the example of the rules in force in cohesion policy.
It should be noted that the rapporteurs introduce provisions allowing the European Commission to suspend payments under the Facility in the event of non-compliance with the rule of law by the beneficiary Member State.
Finally, MEPs plan to put in writing the requirement that 30% of the Facility’s budget expenditure should support the fight against climate change.
See the draft report: https://bit.ly/3gRiBdd (Mathieu Bion)