Brussels, 13/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - After having heard the Finnish minister for regional and municipal affairs, Hannes Manninen, present the Finnish presidency's priorities (EUROPE 9231), members of the EP's regional development committee held an exchange of views with Commissioner Danuta Hübner on implementation of the legislative package on cohesion.
Financial allocation. Ms Hübner indicated that with the entry into force (around 20 July) of new Regulations, the Commission will take decisions on setting out the financial allocations per Member State each year and establishing a list of regions and Member States eligible for the cohesion policy. Therefore, there will be three decisions on financial allocation (one for each objective) and four on eligibility (one for each objective + one for the Cohesion Fund). The Commission will at the same time send a covering letter to each Member State, explaining eligibility to the financial allocation needed for preparing the programmes. After having provided an insight into the work on the Community Strategic Guidelines (which the College adopted on 12 July: see other article) and earmarking, Hübner noted that the Finnish presidency was waiting for the Council to formally adopt these objectives at the beginning of October in so that adoption of programming documents was not held up. Implementing regulation: in this connection the Commissioner indicated that the General Regulation on ERDF, ESF and the Cohesion Fund would be implemented in the following fields: information and publicity; categorisation; management and control systems; irregularities; protection of personal data; financial corrections for non-respect of additionnality; electronic exchange of data and financial engineering actions. For ERDF, Ms Hübner explained that it would be focusing on two sectors: 1) housing: the Regulation announces a list of criteria for determining areas experiencing physical deterioration and social exclusion or threatened by it. It also focuses on the renovations of residential buildings; 2) eligibility rules under operational programmes for the European territorial cooperation objective.
In reply to MEPs, Danuta Hübner pointed out: 1) earmarking (Gisela Kallenbach, German Green): “earmarking does not create a new definition of cohesion policy and does not impose additional administrative procedures”; 2) Solidarity Fund (Rolf Berend, EPP-ED, Germany): “crisis management is also a priority for the Finnish presidency. But ministers for finance are not prepared to change their minds: this instrument will be discussed at the Council by the Finnish presidency.