Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-10-Speech-4-012"
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".
Madam President, I will try to be brief, but the issues are extremely important and I would like to respond to both reports.
As a result, we want to have as many evaluation studies of the needs as possible throughout this year, but also through those meetings and reports we want to identify the best projects to be financed by Jessica as well as the proposed interventions: the actions needed in some Member States. New legislation will be needed, as we see it, as well as a lot of structures.
Regarding Mr Janowski’s report on innovation, the cohesion policy is one of those rare policies in Europe which integrates different sectoral approaches in the overriding context of development strategy and it can, on the one hand, deliver tailor-made solutions for each European region or territory, but at the same time it is critically dependent on coordination and on synergies with all other European as well as national policies. That is why, for the period 2007-2013, we have reinforced the coordination mechanism within the Commission. This policy has, in fact, become a kind of meeting point for many different EU priorities, and research and development and innovation is perhaps the best example of this new approach.
We have institutionalised the new synergies between cohesion policy, the seventh framework programme and the competitiveness and innovation programmes. The last two programmes take into account the specificities of lagging regions, which we have not had before, while the cohesion policy will significantly increase its contribution to research and development, but primarily to innovation activities.
We are also working with two other Commissioners on a communication that would provide exactly the information as well as providing advice on how to combine all those resources of different programmes to increase the efficiency of those programmes as well. That will be adopted in July.
As you know, the Commission has also invested in better coordination between our policies and national policies with regard to innovation, and generally, the Lisbon priorities through the annual reporting and the mechanism of coordinating internally between the two policies in every Member State.
We have also introduced the categorisation of types of investment that would allow us to see how much will be devoted to innovation and then would allow us also to monitor how this investment is progressing across the whole period.
I could not agree with you more on the central point of the report that innovation should be increasingly at the heart of the European cohesion policy, because we cannot today achieve cohesion without investing in innovation capacities in Europe across all sectors and types of territories. We are doing it both through human capital investment and regional competitiveness investment. The good news is that Member States are reacting extremely positively to those requests and we already know how much will be invested in innovation in the years to come.
We are also preparing for the autumn communication from the Commission showing in detail to what extent innovation has been retained in the operational programmes.
Let me express my hope that in the very near future we will have regional innovation strategies in every European region. I think we are very close to achieving this goal.
Lastly, you made very clear the need for facilitating the access to finance, mainly for the micro-companies and small and medium-sized companies; I fully agree on this need. As you know, we have developed ‘Jeremy’ to help with this but we are also in the process of developing an action plan for micro-credit with other services in the Commission. Here we aim not only to increase provision of capital but also to develop mentoring services and reform the national, institutional and legal frameworks to support this kind of access to credit for small companies in a more effective way.
I should like to start by saying that I appreciate very much this possibility of continuing our interinstitutional dialogue on your own-initiative reports. They will play an important role in our thinking as regards the future shape of the policy.
With regard to Mr Andria’s report, I agree with his assessment that many urban centres in Europe face severe housing problems. We are currently negotiating cohesion programmes with all the Member States, and we see that, in all the national strategies and the operational programmes of the new Member States, interventions are foreseen aiming at the rehabilitation of panel housing estates and multi-family houses which were built in those countries in the 1970s and 1980s. So far we have received 340 out of 444 operational programmes and within those programmes our assessment is that around EUR 900 million is foreseen for housing infrastructure.
I also agree with Mr Andria that we have to do much more for deprived urban areas and neighbourhoods. In fact, in the negotiations with Member States we are strongly encouraging them and the regions to pay particular attention to this issue in all the Member States of the Union. It seems that most of them have accepted this idea.
We already have the preliminary estimates of how much funding will be invested in projects: for urban and rural regeneration it will be more than EUR 8 billion in the years to come; for the promotion of clear urban transport, it will be more than EUR 4 billion; and for the rehabilitation of industrial sites and contaminated land, it will be more than EUR 3 billion in 2007-2013.
There are also two elements in those programmes to which we attach great importance, and we will examine them carefully in the negotiations because we believe that they are essential for the success of those programmes. First of all, again in line with your suggestion, there is the need to pay attention to the question of partnership. Clearly our evaluations – and I hope you would agree with me – show that programmes perform much better when they reach out to the local community, as regards both design and, subsequently, implementation.
Secondly, we also pay much attention to the need to adopt an integrated approach, which I think has been a great success of past urban initiatives. In the negotiations we want to see that the problems affecting those stressed urban areas are really addressed in an integrated way, not only through covering different policies and different sectors, but also requiring participation at all levels of governance, from citizens to political stakeholders.
I also support your suggestion to promote the exchange of best practice on housing and on sustainable urban development in general. I am convinced that regions and cities can learn a lot from each other on how to ensure a balance between housing needs, demographic trends and urban development trends. That is why, in this new initiative on the regions for economic change, we have provided for the possibility of setting up a network related to developing sustainable and energy-efficient housing stock, and we hope that before the end of this year this network will be operational.
I should like to say a few words about ‘Jessica’, because we have moved substantially in the last weeks and this increases enormously the scope of efficient financing for housing across Europe. This is carried out with the involvement of the European Investment Bank and the Council of Europe Development Bank. The EIB has already set up a team with, for the time being, seven experts. There will soon be eight to ten professional staff members from the EIB. We have also started, with all the interested Member States, the launch of Jessica evaluation, the first meetings with Greece and Poland have already taken place, and others are scheduled in the weeks to come."@en1
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