Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-12-10-Speech-2-893-000"
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"en.20131210.82.2-893-000"2
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"Mr President, I shall start off by thanking a number of people. First of all, I want to thank all my colleagues on the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, the shadows and our Chair, for their support and, indeed, for their ongoing commitment to this fund, and also from the opinion-giving committees.
I secondly want to thank Parliament itself for its numerous resolutions on maintaining the crisis derogation, and I am pleased to see that the crisis derogation is in the current instrument because a very significant number of applications came in under the crisis derogation. I also want to thank our Commissioner, Commissioner Andor, and the Commission for their ongoing support, along with that of the President of the Commission, Mr Barroso, and Mr Van Rompuy. I want to thank the Lithuanian Presidency. They are not here at the moment, but they certainly showed a willingness to do business and to get a fund in place that was fit for purpose. I also want to thank the Irish Presidency for their efforts to unblock the blocking minority in Council, and they were ultimately successful.
After all of those ‘thank yous’ we have a document here in place this evening and the question is: is it fit for purpose? The Commission in its report tells us that the reintegration rate of European Globalisation Fund participants is 48%. It certainly varies between Member States, but that is a good outcome. We also know that the personalised, tailor-made packages that target workers are effective, in that they reach the harder to reach workers; those, for example, who are older or those who have lower educational attainment.
There were a number of criticisms of the current globalisation fund and I believe we have managed to deal with many of those issues. First of all, we have worked with the Commission to improve the timeliness of the fund and we have a defined timeframe for submission and evaluation of projects now in place. We have broadened the category of workers who can apply to the fund. It now includes self-employed, temporary agency and fixed-term workers.
We had wanted a differentiated co-financing rate, but we had to agree in the end to a single co-financing rate of 60% , but that is still 10% more than the original co-financing rate of 50%, because an issue for some Member States was that the cofinancing rate was too low, so we have moved in the right direction.
Crucially we have capped the special time-limited allowance at 35%. These allowances included mobility allowance, systems and training allowance etc and some Member States were spending up to 70-75% of their application on these measures. We did not believe this was a good use of European money and it certainly did not give European added value, so I am very pleased now that we have capped those allowances and that the majority of the money will go into training, up-skilling, entrepreneurship, etc. This was a red line for Parliament and signalled by the Court of Auditors.
We have also strengthened the partnership principle by ensuring that the package of personalised services is drawn up in consultation either with the redundant workers themselves or their representatives or the social partners, because we know that the objectives of the fund are much more likely to be achieved when this happens.
We have also significantly broadened the eligible beneficiaries to include an equal number of NEETs – that is, those not in education, employment or training – to that of redundant workers for whom the application is made in the first place, provided that the application is in a region which is eligible for the youth employment initiative. EGF support will therefore assist young unemployed as well as redundant workers.
The fund was originally EUR 3 billion. It is now just over a billion. It is a significant decrease and we have a possible doubling of the number of applicants. I sincerely hope the amount we have will be sufficient. We have a number of other improvements which I will outline in my final two minutes because I believe I am over time. My final question is: is it fit for purpose? All I can say is I hope that for those workers who will access this fund that it is."@en1
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