Brussels, 04/04/2005 (Agence Europe) - Mobilising and involving the regional players and the European Commission has paid off, according to the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions of Europe (CPMR). This was the sentiment gained after it obtained the conclusions of the Spring Summit of 22-23 March, in which it explicitly referred for the first time and in several mentions, to the role of the regions in the implementation of the Lisbon strategy, “something the Kok report failed to state in such clear terms”. The CPMR explained in a press release that point 6 in the conclusions clearly stipulated the need to implement the Lisbon strategy by mobilising all national and Community actors, including cohesion policy and by involving regional and local bodies. The CPMR considers that this is “in line with the Commission's proposals on future regional policy, which plan to introduce a 'regional competitiveness and employment' objective”. This aims at allowing them to contribute towards the Lisbon strategy over the long term within a European context. The CPMR therefore congratulates the European Council for this encouraging prospect and supports the common memorandum of the regions on regional competitiveness and employment for 2007-13.
Memorandum of the Regions for regional competitiveness and employment 2007-13
The presidents of the Aquitaine Regions (France), Catalonia (Spain), Marche (Italy) and West Midlands (United Kingdom) have written a common letter in which it encourages all the European regions involved in the regional competitiveness and employment objectives 2007-13 (including the 150 regions in the EU-25) to support a memorandum supporting this objective, which will be addressed to the European Council in June where the summit is expected to focus on the adoption of financial perspectives for 2007-13.
In the memorandum, the signatory regions call on the European institutions to ensure that the economic, social and territorial cohesion sustainability objectives are carried out after 2007. The regions are therefore calling on the Commission to put its goal of setting up a more systematic political dialogue into practice with the regional and local institutions and to take into account the damaging effects that revising regional aid would have for most of the regions, which appears to be the current plan. Memorandum signatory regions affirm that excluding most of the regions from regional aid would seriously obstruct the economic development dynamic in these regions and that it would be incompatible with the principle of economic and territorial cohesion. The memorandum notes that these orientations could result in all productive investment aid to major European companies being got rid of, when in fact it was important to support investment to these companies so that networks and strong centres of excellence could be set up.
Signatory regions are encouraging: 1) the Commission to refuse the 1% of GDP ceiling on the EU budget because this would make attaining EU objectives impossible, particularly those contained in the Lisbon agenda; 2) drawing attention of Member States to the need for attaining greater complemntarity between EU sectoral policies and structural funds and to continue to maintain structural funds for the regions of the EU-15 currently eligible under Objective 2; 3) encourage the Commission in its efforts to simplify processes for managing and inspect icing regional development programmes (info: http://www.cpmr.org ).