The European Parliament’s Committees on Budgets (BUDG) and Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON), on Wednesday 28 October, adopted their negotiating position with the Council of the European Union on the InvestEU programme for the period 2021-2027, which the European Commission had proposed, in May, to strengthen in order to take account of the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic (see EUROPE 12589/4).
The day before, MEPs had adopted the 50 or so compromise amendments that the main political groups had negotiated. On Wednesday, they formally validated the amended text (71 votes in favour, 17 against, 7 abstentions).
However they did not adopt the mandate (48 votes in favour, 22 against, 25 abstentions) that would have enabled them to start interinstitutional negotiations, as the S&D group decided to abstain from the vote. 51 votes in favour were indeed necessary.
The plenary session will have to decide beforehand in November on this mandate, in order, in particular, to validate Parliament’s position on reducing the share of the InvestEU programme’s budget devoted to the fight against climate change from 40% to 30%.
MEPs suggest increasing the state guarantee from the EU budget on which InvestEU will be based by 91.8 billion euros and allocating it to the six identified investment components as follows: - 20.05 billion for sustainable infrastructure; - 11.25 billion for research, innovation and digitisation; - 12.5 billion for SMEs; - 5.57 billion for the social sector and skills; - 31.15 billion for strategic investments; - 11.25 billion to support the solvency of viable companies.
According to MEPs, 60% of investment under the ‘sustainable infrastructure’ component should contribute to climate and environment policies.
The ‘strategic investment’ component should contribute to EU competitiveness, restore productive capacity and reduce dependence on “vulnerable” supply chains in sectors such as health, critical infrastructure, breakthrough innovations, renewable energy. The EU Council has deleted this fifth component suggested by the Commission (see EUROPE 12496/8).
See the compromise text: https://bit.ly/35JKGPU (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)