Cohesion Fund. Annual Report. Complement

With regard to the annual report, the Committee called for the active participation of the regional and local authorities in the management of the Fund, particularly in the establishment of the priorities, the process of considering and selecting the projects, and budgetary management. Further efforts would have to be made to ensure that better environmental impact analyses were carried out in respect of projects and priority was given to the more isolated regions of the ‘convergence’ countries. It also noted that the projects should have a significant impact on regional and inter-regional development; the impact was not, however, necessarily linked to the scale of the project. The Committee would like to receive details of the total number of applications submitted for funding, the percentage of projects that were accepted, the main reasons for rejections, and any input from the regional and local authorities in the decision-making process. It also hoped that elected regional representatives, rather than central government representatives, would participate in the work of the follow-up committees. In future, the annual reports of the Cohesion Fund should include a section on the local, regional and inter-regional impact of the projects. The Committee underlined the importance of proper coordination between the various EU intervention instruments (Cohesion Fund, Structural Funds, EIB). With regard to the annex, the Committee was pleased to note that there had been a reduction in the imbalance between infrastructure projects and environment projects, and it pointed out that the comments in its Opinion on the cohesion financial instrument, which related to the role that local and regional authorities would play, also applied in the case of the Cohesion Fund.