The Committee on Regional Development adopted the own-initiative report by Rosa D'AMATO (EFD, IT) on the implementation of the thematic objective ‘enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs’ – Article 9(3) of the Common Provisions Regulation (EU) No 1303/2013 on the thematic objective of enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs.
Members recalled that the shared objective of investments under the ESI funds is to provide support for the delivery of the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Each ESI Fund supports 11 thematic objectives and thematic objective 3 (TO3) is about ‘enhancing the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises’. TO3 is one of the thematic objectives with the highest percentage of overall funding (13.9 %).
The 23 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the EU, which account for around 99 % of all businesses, make a fundamental contribution to economic growth, social cohesion, innovation and high-quality job creation, providing over 100 million jobs which generate 2 out of every 3 private sector jobs, and maintaining double the employment growth rate of larger enterprises.
Enhancing support from the ESI Funds to SMEs: given that SMEs are the driving forces behind the European economy and are key to the success of Cohesion Policy, but that they often face multiple challenges owing to their size, Members recommended further enhancing the support from ESI Funds directed towards SMEs. They called on the Commission, the Member States as the regional authorities to:
Simplified and less regulated access to credit: regretting that investors and banks are often reluctant to finance businesses in their start-up and early expansion phases and that many SMEs, especially small start-ups, have found it hard to gain access to external funding, Members asked for particular attention to be paid to improve access to finance for microenterprises and start-ups that want to scale-up.
Remedying the low absorption rate: the report noted that the complex management of structural funds and administrative burdens, as well as limited access to financing for SMEs and complexity of implementation of support schemes, led to an insufficient absorption of such funds by SMEs. It called on the Commission to rapidly prepare an assessment of this issue, in cooperation with the Member States, and submit it to Parliament. It stressed that poor administrative capacity may hinder the successful and timely implementation of TO3.
Public procurement: recalling the importance for SMEs to have a transparent, consistent and innovative public procurement set-up, Members urged that obstacles faced by SMEs in bidding for contracts be removed as far as possible, eliminating unnecessary administrative burdens. While welcoming Directive 2014/24/EU and the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD), Members stresses the need to continue with the strict application of anti-error and anti-fraud measures without adding to the administrative burden, and to simplify administrative procedures in order to prevent errors; calls on contracting authorities wishing to group contracts together to take care not to exclude SMEs from the process by the sheer scale of the final lot, since larger contracts could involve more cumbersome criteria.
Enhancing transparency: noting with concern that many SME organisations in the Member States are not really involved and are often only informed without being adequately consulted, Members stressed the need for actual implementation and respect of the partnership principle also at the drafting, preparation and implementation stages of partnership agreements and operational programmes.
Further recommendations: Members called on the Commission and the Member States to:
Lastly, the report stressed Parliament’s role in the supervision of results-oriented implementation of cohesion policy.