Members of the European Parliament’s Industry (ITRE) and Budgets (BUDG) Committees, meeting on Monday 9 October, voted by 43 votes to 6, with 15 abstentions, in favour of their compromise on the amendments proposed by the majority of parliamentary groups to the draft Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP). The STEP project is all that remains of the ‘European Sovereignty Fund’, announced by the Commission in June 2023, and now intended to serve as a financing instrument dedicated to clean technologies, deep tech and biotechnology.
According to the rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs of the two committees, these amendments include two major improvements to the Commission’s initial text, which was deemed to fall well short of the institution’s stated ambitions (see EUROPE 13226/4).
Firstly, MEPs are proposing to increase the total budget for the STEP project from €10 billion to €13 billion. The scope of the regulation has been revised to cover the same sectors that already exist in other EU industrial policy texts, notably the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA). For example, the ‘clean techs’ mentioned in the Commission’s text have been replaced by ‘net-zero techs’. MEPs are also working to define more precisely the sectors eligible for the scheme.
Finally, the compromise introduces a change to the system for allocating the €5 billion from the platform’s ‘innovation fund’: these will have to be made available “in equal shares” between Member States with a GDP below the EU average and the other Member States. Originally, this fund was only intended for countries with a low average GDP, but this system is considered to be detrimental to the Union’s competitiveness, according to MEPs.
The text still has to be the subject of a compromise with the Member States, who have not yet adopted a position on the matter. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)