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Report No 25 by the VIth Assembly Committee on the Marche Region's participation in the Early Warning Mechanism within the meaning of Protocol No 2 to the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union - Policy dialogue with the houses of the Italian Parliament relating to the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions "Guidelines on application of the measures linking effectiveness of the European Structural and Investment Funds to sound economic governance according to Article 23 of Regulation (EU) 1303/2013 - COM(2014) 494 final of 30 July 2014"

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THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF THE MARCHE REGION

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makes the following comments:

Introduction

The regions attribute increasing strategic importance to the role that European cofinancing and cohesion policy have to play in terms of the enhancement, safeguarding and development of their economic, social and environmental fabric, following an approach that now underpins the Europe 2020 Strategy, and in the new cohesion policy for 2014-2020, based on greater concentration of resources on a limited number of priorities, applying the principle of quantifying and achieving consensus on goals in advance with regional and local authorities not least, in order to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Macroeconomic conditionality - along with all the types of ex ante conditionality that each Member State has to respect to contribute to the achievement of the goals and priorities set out in the Partnership Agreement - is the real challenge for the 2014-2020 programming period, and it is the instrument for coordinating cohesion policy and EU economic governance. Thus, in practice, the EU's ability to make cohesion policy genuinely effective and the credibility of the instruments it uses to achieve this effectiveness depend on the application of macroeconomic conditionality.

The European Commission's communication sets out guidelines that aim to provide greater certainty regarding the procedures for implementing certain specific provisions of Article 23, in particular with regard to paragraphs 1 and 6, concerning what is meant by "review" and "types of amendments" to Partnership Agreements, and what is meant by the "effective action" that the Member State is required to take in response to the European Commission's request for amendment.

Regarding compliance with the subsidiarity principle

The communication in question is a "non-legislative act", interpreting literally Articles 3, 4 and 5 of Protocol No. 2 on the Application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, appended to the European Treaties. Therefore, the question of compliance with the subsidiarity and proportionality principles is not relevant.

Rather, the legal nature of the act raises the issue of "effectiveness" and "capacity to have binding legal effect" in the light of the aims the Commission intends to pursue with the communication.

With the guidelines, the Commission aims to clarify some of the content of Article 23. In this connection, however, the framework regulation does not give the Commission the power to adopt a delegated act under Article 290 TFEU in order to supplement "non-essential" elements - inter alia - of the legislative act, as Article 149 of the framework regulation does not include Article 23 among the provisions for which delegation of power is provided for.

It should therefore be noted that the guidelines are a weak instrument for ensuring compliance in practice with Article 23 and, more generally, application of the macroeconomic conditionality principle, given also that the guidelines introduce a proper procedure for amending Partnership Agreements, thereby in practice supplementing Article 16 of the framework regulation.

Substance

A)The guidelines state that "frequent reprogramming" should be avoided and that, more generally, the "reprogramming powers granted to the Commission" should be "used carefully": this is true, not least given that negotiations with the Commission are still underway on the approval of the first version of the operational programmes, and these negotiations should result in the final adoption of the programmes by the regions not before the end of 2014 or - more likely - in the first few months of 2015.

The framework regulation does not specify how detailed the request for reprogramming and/or amendment of Partnership Agreements or operational programmes should be. The guidelines give the Commission the power to indicate the programmes and priorities that should be strengthened, remoulded or even reduced in terms of the resources allocated, so as to make the measures and initiatives they provide for more effective with regard to the provisions of the relevant country-specific recommendation being implemented.

Where the Commission exercises this prerogative, the related request for amendment must be properly substantiated. As regards the nature of amendments, the guidelines state that the Commission will indicate not only the programmes and priorities that should be subject to reprogramming, but also the minimum content of the amendments to be made by the Member State and the specific objectives to be achieved, along with examples of interventions.

In this connection, in order to maximise the impact of the Commission's intervention, we propose that the recommendations made also cover the result indicators for the specific interventions subject to reprogramming and, where necessary, amendment of the implementing procedures put in place by the Member States where this has proven ineffective.

B)Involvement of the partners.

The guidelines make no mention of involving the partners in the procedures for reprogramming and amending Partnership Agreements and operational programmes; in this regard it should be stressed that Article 5 of the framework regulation gives a key role to public authorities in the widest sense of the term, economic and social partners and all other bodies representing civil society, reminding Member States of their duty to involve the partners in drawing up and implementing the Agreements and operational programmes.

Under Article 5, the Commission adopted Delegated Regulation (EU) No240/2014 of 7January 2014 on the European code of conduct on partnership in the framework of the European Structural and Investment Funds, which regulates in detail the role of the partners in the area of activities connected with the implementation of the ESIF.

For these reasons, an explicit reference needs to be added to Delegated Regulation (EU) No240/2014 to ensure that the regulation is applied.

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COR-2014-06574-01-00-INFO-TRA (IT) 1/3