Debate: Establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility
Date: TUESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2021
Speaker: Siegfried Mureşan
Country: Germany
Language: EN

This support, this money, is money to overcome this crisis, but it is also money to make us stronger in the face of the next crisis. It is money for recovery and for resilience, to make us more resilient to better face the next challenges in the future. Never, ever, again in the future, people and enterprises should be affected by crisis as they have been until now. It’s money to modernise our economies, to make them cleaner and greener, to make them more digital, more innovative, more modern. This is why how we are going to use this money is very important.  Parliament proposes that the money goes in six directions. Firstly, greening. Second, digital. Thirdly, economic cohesion: money for the private sector, for small and medium-sized enterprises, for industry, money for infrastructure projects. This is the third pillar. The fourth pillar is social cohesion: money for the people affected, different social categories affected by this pandemic, including children, including elderly people.  Fifth, institutional resilience: we are going to strengthen the institutions in Member States about which we learnt during this crisis that they have to modernise, increase their capacities. And here I would like to be very clear – countries can use this support to build or modernise existing hospitals, to build new hospitals or modernise and enlarge existing hospitals. And the sixth pillar is money for youth.  We, as the European Parliament, have negotiated intensely in the last months and we believe that through Parliament, the European Recovery and Resilience Facility has been made better. What have we achieved? Firstly, we have managed to offer and agree on an increase in pre-financing. That means that once a national plan of one country is approved at European level, the pre-financing, the support that it will receive, will be bigger – 13%, thanks to the involvement of Parliament, compared to the 10% initially proposed. This means that the recovery will be quicker and more decisive. We will be able to create more jobs more quickly due to the increase in this pre-financing.  Then the structure with the six pillars, which I just described, is also a proposal and an achievement of the European Parliament. We are setting up clear rules for spending the money, but within these rules we are also leaving flexibility for Member States to decide where they use the money. We say 37% of the amount at European level should go into greening and 20% into digital. But we do not impose other specific proportions for different directions because the needs of different Member States are different. Malta is different from Finland, Portugal is different from Ireland, Luxembourg or Romania, and countries should be able to decide, within the European rules, to use the money where they need it.  We, as the European Parliament, have also imposed that Member States make a self-assessment with regard to safeguarding the cybersecurity of the European Union while accessing money from this Recovery and Resilience Facility. In clear words, the money should be used in a way in which the cybersecurity of the Union as a whole and of individual Member States should not be affected. For example, money should not be used for investment in 5G networks by hostile companies from countries outside of the European Union against our will. The money is not for ordinary budgetary expenditure to finance deficits. The money is for investment and reforms, and reforms are a key concept to make our economy stronger for the future, and this is something which Parliament will insist on very much. We, as the European Parliament, have also achieved that there will be democratic control for all of the money spent, democratic control and legitimacy through the involvement of the European Parliament. Parliament will be involved in all of the future phases. We will supervise, we will scrutinise to make sure that money is being spent according to the rules. And we have also achieved, together with the Commission and with our colleagues in the Council, that the European Recovery and Resilience Facility will be revised after two years. We are going to look at it. We are going to have a review, evaluating how things go and see if something needs to be further improved or adjusted. Today we are going to vote in favour of this Facility, I believe, by a very large majority. I would like to thank my co-rapporteurs, Eider Gardiazabal Rubial from the Socialist Group and Dragoș Pîslaru from the Renew Group, for the excellent cooperation which we had throughout this process, and I would also like to thank the shadow rapporteurs of all of the other political groups. This Facility was adopted by a large majority in the joint meeting of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Committee on Budgets (BUDG), and I believe a large majority of Members will also support it today. This is thanks to the excellent cooperation which we had throughout the groups.  To conclude, the experience of the last year shows us that none of us, no country alone, can overcome this pandemic; only the joint response of all of us, based on solidarity, will help us. This is a day of success for the European Parliament. It’s a good day for Europe. Thank you very much for your support.