Brussels, 08/12/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 8 December, Regional Policy Commissioner Danuta Hübner said she was satisfied with the progress the process to approve and pay out funding for the new generation of cohesion policy programmes for the period 2007-2013. She also noted the high level of utilisation of appropriations for the programmes still on-going (2000-2006) and presented new implementation arrangements of the 2006 regulation of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Cohesion Fund.
New programmes for 2007-2013: the Commissioner said that six Member States - Austria, Malta, Latvia, Hungary, Denmark and Poland - had submitted their national strategic reference frameworks, and four of these - Malta, Austria, Denmark and Latvia - had submitted several (around a dozen in all) operational programmes. The Commission expects to approve a total of 330 (ERDF and Cohesion Fund) operational programmes by the middle of 2007. “We are so far ahead in the process for Malta that we think we will be able to approve the first programme before Christmas,” Ms Hübner said. The Commission has expressed its satisfaction at the way this process has been going and notes that the EU is almost a year ahead of schedule on the adoption of programmes for 2000-2006 (which were completed only in 2002).
Budget execution: the Commissioner gave the latest, very encouraging, information on the execution of the 2006 budget, including the N+2 rule for the 2004 budget. The news is very good for the ten new Member States which joined the EU in 2004, given that under the N+2 rule money not spent may be lost, since they had executed 99.99% of appropriations by the start of December and “should be in a position to reach 100% by the end of the year,” said Ms Hübner. This is an announcement which gives the lie to recent statements from some Member States, during the 2007-2013 financial framework negotiations, doubting the ability of the new EU arrivals to “absorb” Community funds. The result of the EY15 is less good (91.5% execution) and the Commission is expecting to have to do a great deal of work between Christmas and New Year, added the Commissioner.
In response to press questions on the goods results recorded by the EU10, she said that the Commission had never felt that these countries could not spend the Community money, but she said that 2006 was, for them, the first year of verification under the N+2 rule (there are still two years' use for this rule, for the 2005 and 2006 budgets). The current high level of execution showed that the EU10 “react very well to challenges and their execution ability is improving progressively,” she stressed. She said that the figure of 100% had not yet been reached because the Commission was awaiting payment requests for two Objective 2 projects from Prague (Czech Republic) and Bratislava (Slovenia). For the EU15, the Commission expected to receive several requests at the end of the year and hoped that almost 100% of funds would be utilised. “Greece and Italy are the countries which have the furthest to go to avoid disengagement (cancellation of appropriations after expiry of the N+2 deadline),” she said.
Implementation of a new cohesion policy: “We have just adopted the last piece of the puzzle” for the mechanism for the new generation of programmes beginning 2007, Ms Hübner said. She felt this regulation would allow the Commission to “better regulate”. She said this simpler regulation for the 2007-2013 period was to replace nine legal instruments and also contained “several pieces of good news: - for the first time, the list of beneficiaries, the operations and the amount of public funding allocated will have to be published (except for European Social Fund projects which have too many beneficiaries). This information will be available on Internet each time a project is approved, and the Commission will maintain a central database of all national information on these beneficiaries, she added; - also for the first time, the Commission will not reimburse expenses before receiving the written assurance of an independent body that the control and management systems are in place and operate properly in the Member State. These provisions will prevent illegal expenditure being presented to the Commission by the country for reimbursement. In addition, from 2008, the certification authority should forward a statement to the Commission by 31 March at the latest specifying for each of the priority avenues of the operational programme the amounts withdrawn from the spending accounts presented the previous year (after cancellation of all or part of the public contribution to the operation), the amounts recovered deducted from these spending accounts and the amounts to be recovered on 31 December of the previous year; - intervention of the Structural Funds for the period 2007-2013 will be shared out into different categories (priority themes, namely research and technological development, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, the form of financing such as loan or venture capital, type of territory, economic activities and localisation), which will allow the Commission to receive information from Member States showing how funds have been allocated to various priorities (the European regulation stipulates that 60% of spending in convergence objective regions and 75% of spending in regional competitiveness and employment objective regions be devoted to priorities of the Lisbon Strategy); - all the data on the operational programmes (indicative annual allocation, financing plans, spending accounts …) should be sent by the countries to the Commission using a secure computerised system (48% of the EU budget will be electronically managed, as this system will be used also for rural development funding and the fisheries fund); - for most operational programmes, the rules of eligibility will no longer be fixed at Community level (national rules will apply, to ensure more “decentralisation”); - for operational programmes that do not exceed €750 million in spending and whose Community cofinancing does not exceed 40% of the total public spending, a Member State may be supported by national bodies and national rules for carrying out certain control and audit functions (greater “proportionality”). (lc)