The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) recently claimed that the funds from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) allocated for transport projects should be increased from 51 to 63 million euros. The EESC also made additional recommendations on how to assign funds more efficiently.
The EESC presented two arguments in favour of increasing the CEF funds. First, the NextGenerationEU mechanism will expire in 2026, creating a financing gap. Secondly, the EU needs to ramp up its efforts to be ready for emerging threats coming “from hostile countries such as Russia and Belarus”.
The EESC is not asking only for more CEF funds for transport, they also want to boost the ones for energy projects. Currently, the EU has allocated 51,5 million euros for the former and 29,9 million euros for the latter. The EESC is recommending to increase them to 63,3 and 36,7 million euros respectively. It needs to be mentioned that the 2028-2034 CEF funds for transport were already doubled from 25,8 to 51,5 billion euros last July.
Expand beyond the EU
One of the other recommendations made by the EESC is that the funds should be extended to projects beyond the EU “through the expansion of TEN-T corridors to candidate countries.” The Committee is also urging the EU not to get hyper-focused on cross-border projects. “While this direction is desirable in itself, investments implemented within a single Member State should not be entirely excluded”, it stated.
‘Fill the gaps’
Another pledge made by the EESC is to improve the eligibility criteria for the CEF funds, which are currently absent. Since large-scale improvement projects are more common in larger Member States, they might have an advantage in how the funds are spread out. According to the committee, however, more attention should be paid to those areas where the infrastructure gap is wider, especially across the TEN-T corridors.
The Committee also highlighted how funding decisions are often made at the very last moment, right before the construction phase. “It is perceived too late and this can result in the cancellation of the project, if a co-financing decision is not secured”, the EESC pointed out. In fact, most of the projects applying for these funds usually don’t get any money, as the recently published first-ever CEF report revealed.
One final point raised by the EESC is that projects need to be entirely covered by the CEF mechanism. “Splitting a project prolongs its implementation and may even result in the part of the project that does not have secured financing not being completed”. In other words, if a project got funds from a previous CEF package but is still ongoing, financing should continue even if criteria are no longer met.