Trans-European network for transport: the Court of Auditors' special report No 6/2005

The Council adopted conclusions in which it welcomes the Special Report No 6/2005 on the efficiency and the effectiveness of the Commission's management system of the Trans-European Network for Transport (TEN-T). It considers that these special reports by the Court of Auditors are an invaluable tool for assessing the efficiency and the effectiveness of the management of EU expenditure programmes, and contribute to improving the quality of EU expenditure overall. However, the Council notes with concern that the execution of the 14 TEN-T priority projects is behind schedule and only 8 out of the 14 will be completed by the initial deadline of 2010. It takes note of the Court's finding that, in particular, cross-border sections are facing delays as these sections receive less priority at national level and may require greater coordination efforts from the Member States concerned.

The Council supports the Court’s recommendation that the Commission should:

- amend and complete key aspects of its model financing decision, in particular by defining more clearly the scope of the activities to be co-financed under studies on the one hand and works on the other;

- develop a consistent and coherent TEN-T evaluation methodology and documents it in a publicly available manual;

- reduce the number of different application and evaluation forms, and revise their content so that all relevant evaluation and selection criteria required by the legislator are covered;

- strengthen the monitoring of projects by defining minimum standards for project status reporting and

performing on-site project inspections and ex-post impact assessments more frequently, so that lessons can be learnt on how to implement TEN-T more efficiently and on how to optimise the effectiveness of the Community funding in this area;

- establish, where necessary in cooperation with the Member States, appropriate legal bases, procedures and tools to improve the internal coordination of transport infrastructure funding in order to identify potential cases of over- or double funding.