Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-15-Speech-4-011"
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"en.20070315.3.4-011"2
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"Mr President, islands and other territories with natural or specific constraints are very important to the Commission in terms of ensuring territorial cohesion, developing cross-border cooperation – usually with third countries, tourism, culture and other issues.
I think that these examples really show how, through our state aid reform process, we are making the rules more predictable and reducing the administrative burden of state aid notification, and that was what you were asking for in the interests of island regions and all other stakeholders.
While acknowledging that a cross-sectoral approach may be useful, cohesion policy aims to play a central role in dealing with the specific problems of these territories. In the draft 2007-2013 Cohesion Policy General Regulation, issued in July 2004, the Commission specifically proposed granting a co-financing rate top-up to these regions. Unfortunately, this proposal was not finally adopted by the Council in the final version of the regulation approved in July 2006 and which is now in force, as you are aware. However, the Commission will ensure, during the ongoing negotiations on the Cohesion Policy intervention for 2007-2013, that the specific constraints of these territories are duly taken into account in the corresponding programmes and that suitable measures are programmed to tackle them.
In addition, the Commission is now preparing the Fourth Cohesion Report to be published in May, which will contain a comprehensive analysis of the state of play and trends in territorial cohesion in the EU, including islands and regions with natural handicaps. Likewise the Commission intends to continue upgrading work within the ESPON programme in order to obtain more suitable indicators and more updated information on these territories. At the same time, the Commission would point out that statistical data for islands or other territories that are NUTS II or NUTS III regions are already available. Gathering statistical information for smaller territories is certainly more difficult, but in fact 95% of the European island population, outermost regions excluded, live in NUTS II or NUTS III regions.
Turning to the practical implementation of the notion of territorial cohesion, despite the lack of an explicit legal base as provided by the Constitutional Treaty, the Council already agreed in 2004 in Rotterdam to introduce the territorial dimension into the Lisbon process. It also started to develop the territorial agenda and this document, which aims at presenting the challenges, objectives and policy recommendations for territorial cohesion, is due to be adopted in May 2007 in Leipzig.
Moreover, the Community strategy guidelines on cohesion adopted by the Council last October include a specific chapter on the territorial dimension of cohesion policy. The Commission is now working to ensure their practical implementation in the programming documents that are now being negotiated.
The Commission is very much in favour of promoting Euro-regions or similar structures in order to manage cross-border transnational and interregional cooperation. These bodies could be particularly suited to islands and other regions with natural handicaps and, in addition, the Commission encourages these territories to make use of the brand new European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation in order to facilitate the management of the corresponding programmes.
With regard to state aid, it may be that regional investment aid is not the best instrument to tackle local problems in islands. I believe that the islands’ main problems can be tackled more effectively with, for example, horizontal instruments. Our state aid rules already allow for many forms of aid. For example, our rules on services of general economic interest allow compensation for the provision of local public services, including passenger transport services.
Secondly, our new guidelines on risk capital and our framework for research development and innovation offer new opportunities to support young, innovative companies, with extra bonuses for small and medium-sized enterprises.
In some cases, the support levels needed by small islands will not be counted as aids at all. Under the new de minimis regulation, aid of up to EUR 200 000, granted over any period of 3 years will not be counted as aid. Investment for all kinds of public infrastructure can be financed. They do not have an aid element. Moreover, the specific situation of islands is effectively taken into account in the new regional aid guidelines. Under the new form of aid to help business start-ups, a 5% bonus is given to small islands."@en1
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