More than ten years after its first audit, the European Court of Auditors concludes in a new report, published on Wednesday 6 July, that there is little evidence that the benefits of the Leader approach outweigh the costs and risks it entails.
The EU has used the Leader approach (local actor-led development) to fund projects in rural, urban and coastal areas, providing up to €9.2 billion of funding for the period 2014-2020. Local action groups play a decisive role in this process.
Eva Lindström, the member of the Court of Auditors responsible for the audit, said: “many of the projects we examined could have been financed more cheaply by other EU funds”.
The auditors recognise that Leader tends to facilitate local engagement. However, local action groups are often not representative. The presence of women and young people is still only marginal.
Leader’s participatory approach entails high administrative and operational costs. According to the European Commission, these costs amounted to more than €1 billion (a quarter of total expenditure) by the end of 2020.
The application and approval processes for projects, which can include up to eight steps, remain, according to the auditors, too complicated and too slow. As a result, only 39% of the projects were funded by Member States and one (Slovakia) did not fund any.
In their report, the auditors point out that for some of the projects supported (e.g. the purchase of tractors by farmers), it would sometimes have been more beneficial to have better targeted rural development measures outside the Leader framework.
The Commission is currently examining the relevance, effectiveness, coherence and added value of Leader, but this assessment will not be published until next year at the earliest. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)