The European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI) was unanimous on the European Commission’s proposal for cohesion funds for the 2028-2034 period, finding it lacking in an initial exchange of views, on Tuesday 17 March (see EUROPE 13816/9).
“We are going to have to do the work that was not done by the executive body”, complained co-rapporteur Pascal Arimont (EPP, Belgian).
Similarly, Kathleen Funchion (The Left, Irish) did not mince her words: “We must not hesitate to say that this is a bad idea, and that we need to start from scratch, because we know that the regions will be sidelined by this approach”. The more central governance proposed by the Commission has been criticised since it was presented, in July 2025 (see EUROPE 13796/19).
Mr Arimont wants to strengthen the role of the regions, “so that they can co-decide, co-negotiate, so that they can take their destiny into their own hands and not be tied hand and foot to the States, to central administrations that could impose things dictated to the regions and municipalities”.
The co-rapporteur Marcos Ros Sempere (S&D, Spanish) wants to bring back the mechanisms for investment that were previously present in previous regulations. “We need to provide legal certainty for local players, so that the actions they want to carry out over the long term have a budget line item, and secondly, so that they have a legal basis on which to work and, at the end of the period, be able to justify the investment”, he argued.
Mr Ros Sempere also wants to restore a system of targets with clear indicators, and to withdraw the a priori price-setting system proposed by the European Commission. “All the local and regional authorities are telling us that it is impossible to work with an eye to the future, when prices are fixed in advance”, he reported.
For her part, Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle (Renew Europe, Dutch) insisted on the need for a degree of flexibility “to avoid the situations that have arisen in recent years, with cohesion policy being a kind of common pot for other EU priorities, for emergencies, where we dip into cohesion”.
“With pre-financing, we can always see that money is going where it should not”, she added. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)