This week we met with MEP Gabriele Zimmer, shadow rapporteur for the Parliament on the European Social Fund (ESF) and the EU Program for Social Change and Innovation.

We highlighted the main points which in our opinion are essential to ensure that the next generation of EU funds supports the achievement of the inclusive objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy.

In particular:

Concerning the ESF, we looked at the draft report of the Parliament's Employment and Social Affairs Committee. We remarked how the rapporteur for the ESF, Elisabeth Morin-Chartier, is putting forward amendments to increase the focus on employment in the provisions on social inclusion and poverty. We welcome the support expressed in the report to the allocation of a minimum overall share of the cohesion fund for the ESF, the disapproval of applying macro-economic conditionalities and the addition of quality when improving quality. We are however concerned about the suggested limitation of the objective to fight discrimination to employment situations and the additional conditions for social partners and NGOs to receive grants for participating in ESF programmes.

On the EU Program for Social Change and Innovation, we are happy that the rapporteur MEP Steinruck has decided to reconfirm the Commission’s allocation for the Progress axis up to 60%. We reminded that particular attention has to be paid to:

• the definition of a specific objective in the Progress axis that separates social inclusion and prevention of poverty from employment, as for the most vulnerable tailored pathways to promote their inclusion are in many cases a pre-requisite to have access to the labour market
• the inclusion of civil society organisations as full partners together with regional and local authorities and social partners throughout the whole cycle of the programme.

The last point is a key requisite for a more effective use of all funds and is again one of our main requests on the Common Provisions Regulation on structural funds. Other main demands concern the deletion of macro-economic conditionalities from all structural funds, an allocation of 25% to the ESF and the exclusion of the food programme from the 20% of the ESF which is devoted to social inclusion and fight against poverty.