Nelson de Sousa, the Portuguese Minister of Planning, assured that the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council wants to move as quickly as possible to enable the implementation of the various texts agreed within the framework of cohesion policy, during a debate with MEPs from the Regional Development Committee (REGI) on Monday 1 February.
“You have indicated that you consider as a priority the finalisation of all the regulations currently under negotiation, particularly the General Regulation of the funds and the ERDF Regulation. This is also the will of our committee”, stressed the president of REGI, Younous Omarjee (The Left, France) in his introductory remarks, before reviewing the stages before the adoption in the EU Official Journal of the different regulations.
According to the MEP, it will take 2 weeks to translate all the texts, then another 6 weeks for the EU Council’s lawyer-linguists to clean them up, before paving the way for final approvals and votes in the European Parliament’s plenary session and in the Council of the EU, and finally for the acts to be signed and then published in the Official Journal.
The task is not yet complete on the interinstitutional negotiations (trilogues) front, stressed Constanze Krehl (S&D, Germany), co-rapporteur on the Common Provisions Regulation and REACT-EU.
The co-legislators will meet next week to finalise the work on the recitals of the legislative proposals. A trilogue will be held on 9 February on the finalisation of the recitals of the Regulation on the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Cohesion Fund (CF). The next day they will discuss the recitals of the Common Provisions Regulation, we are told.
Mr de Sousa assured that he wanted to act quickly, and that the Presidency of the EU Council is ready to organise the number of trilogues necessary to enable the rapid programming of funds for all the texts agreed last year (see EUROPE 12620/12), which represent 70% of the financial envelope of the cohesion policy, he recalled. He also wants to move quickly on the European Social Fund plus, which was the subject of an interim agreement between Parliament and the EU Council last Thursday (see EUROPE 12647/15).
Speaking on behalf of Pascal Arimont (EPP, Belgium), rapporteur on the Brexit adjustment reserve fund, the Portuguese minister assured that work had begun in the EU Council (see EUROPE 12647/6) and that he intended to seal an interinstitutional agreement in the first half of 2021 to allow implementation in the second half of the year.
Mr de Sousa also mentioned the European cross-border mechanism, a text which is pending in the EU Council. In this respect, he said he wanted to determine the way forward for resuming the legislative process with the European Parliament (see EUROPE 12195/23). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)