Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI) expressed their concerns to the European Commission, on Tuesday 8 November, about the impact of the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’ (RRF) on cohesion.
Younous Omarjee (The Left, French) said that the RRF, with €700 billion - compared to €390 billion for cohesion - “can be a destabilising force” if it does not follow the cohesion principles contained in the treaties. MEPs are concerned that, in the absence of complementarity between the RRF and Cohesion Policy, the latter would be gradually abandoned. “The reality is that local authorities and Member states are going to the RRF because it’s quicker, simpler and less controlled”, noted Jan Olbrycht (EPP, Polish).
The risk, he continued, is of increasing centralisation at the expense of the co-management provided for in regional policy. In fact, the RRF does not introduce an obligation to consult local authorities. “I think the RRF has a negative impact on cohesion, because if there is the possibility to go fast, it questions cohesion. But speed is not everything, quality is important, participation is important”, argued Niklas Nienass (Greens/EFA, German).
MEPs also said that delays in the 2021-2027 cohesion policy were partly due to the RRF. Not only does RRF expenditure have to be committed by 2026, as opposed to 2030 for cohesion, but the authorities are also faced with capacity constraints. While the European Commission recognised the situation, it argued that “the fact that Member States prepared first the RRF does not at all handicap the further role of the cohesion, because everything will be done in complementarity [...] It can be that Member States first select investments to be paid under the RRF, and then as soon as the RRF payment stops, they use the cohesion money to continue the implementation of the same investments later on”. (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)