CoR members gathering at their plenary session adopted today by overwhelming majority the draft opinion on State Aid and Services of General Economic Interest by Markus Töns, Member of the North Rhine-Westphalia Landtag.
"EU law governing state aid in relation to public services has become too detailed and abstract due to the complexity of its content and competing definitions of concepts. The majority of services of general economic interest at local level however involve measures that purely have a local effect and therefore no impact on the EU's internal market. We therefore urgently need simpler rules and more legal certainty for local and regional authorities when deciding which activities can be funded with public money, without breaching European rules. Here, the devil is obviously in the detail", he stressed.
Welcoming the most recent decisions in which the European Commission recognised that many individual cases of aid for local infrastructure or local services have very little impact in other Member States and therefore do not fall within the scope of EU state aid rules, Töns points out that: "these are encouraging signs. We hope that the European Commission will still go some steps further in the revision of the Almunia package expected for 2017.”
In his draft opinion, he reiterates the CoR's call for the general exempt from state aid scrutiny for co-financed projects under the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) and the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) as well as for infrastructure investments in energy, broadband, airports and ports.
Likewise, he suggests widening the concept of SGEI by including social services such as assistance to refugees, social housing as well as digital infrastructure, and to guarantee the exemption of SGEIs in international trade agreements.
The opinion fits into a broader context of recasting and simplifying EU rules on State aid. The PES line has already been developed in the CoR opinions on the Reform of the EU State aid rules on Services of General Economic Interest (rapporteur: Karl-Heinz Lambertz, PES/Belgium), on the Regional State aid guidelines for 2014-2020 (rapporteur: Jean-Paul Denanot, PES/France), on the EU guidelines on State aid for rescuing and restructuring firms in difficulty (rapporteur: Christophe Rouillon, PES/France) and on State aid to regional airports (Catiusica Marini, PES/Italy).
