On Monday 31 March, João Oliveira (The Left, Portuguese) tabled a proposal to extend the lifespan of the European recovery plan, NextGenerationEU, beyond December 2026, during a joint debate in the Committee on Budgets (BUDG) and the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON).
The extension of the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’ (RRF) could facilitate the full use of European funds and would coincide with the start of the post-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework, said Mr Oliveira. In his view, while the uptake of RRF funds varies between Member States, they all face the same challenge of meeting the milestones and targets of their national recovery plans by August 2026 at the latest.
The European Commissioner for Cohesion Policy, Raffaele Fitto, and the Commissioner for Economy, Valdis Dombrovskis, who were present at a regular dialogue on the implementation of the ‘RRF’, did not respond directly to questions on the lifespan of the European recovery plan put by Paulius Saudargas (EPP, Lithuanian) and Giuseppe Lupo (S&D, Italian). Above all, they focused on how to help Member States to accelerate the consumption of all the European funds allocated to them within the allotted time.
“We encourage all Member States to carefully re-examine the implementation of their plans and to take immediate action where needed by requesting a targeted revision”, said Mr Dombrovskis.
He cited a number of options, such as scaling up existing measures that work well, expanding successful financial instruments, transferring funds from the RRF to other EU initiatives (InvestEU programme and STEP platform for strategic technologies) and/or reducing the scale of projects in order to retain the parts that are achievable by August 2026. And the projects withdrawn can be financed by other EU policies, such as cohesion policy, he pointed out.
Noting an acceleration in the implementation of national recovery plans, Mr Fitto nevertheless felt that “there is still a lot of work to do in a very short timeframe”. More than 5000 milestones and targets - or 70% of the total - remain to be assessed before the end of the Facility, and €344 billion - or 53% of the Facility’s total allocation - is still to be disbursed, he noted. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)