Spain must execute 140,000 million euros in six years from the European Recovery Plan, which constitutes a very important management challenge. The “Spain can” Plan itself already warns of possible operational “bottlenecks”, due to lack of means, or legal, given the complexity of the procedure.
On the one hand, if these obstacles are not overcome, by delaying spending commitments and, in this way, preventing them from being met with the amount allocated from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, the recovery of the Spanish economy to which they are intended These funds could be frustrated, with the consequent destruction of businesses and jobs.
Therefore, to maximize the impact of these funds, it is essential to eliminate these bottlenecks and bureaucratic obstacles in the current legislation on public contracts and subsidies.
CEOE's response
With this urgency, at the beginning of October, within the CEOE Legal Commission, a working group was set up made up, on the one hand, by experts and national referents in Public Law and, on the other hand, by representatives of sectoral business organizations with extensive experience in tenders and grants.
The CEOE proposal that has been derived from these works is structured around an ad hoc emergency rule that temporarily exempts, without modifying them, the application of certain provisions of the public procurement and subsidies legislation, when dealing with the distribution of Next Generation EU funds.
Specifically, the approval of a Royal Decree-law is proposed with modifications to specific provisions of the Law of Public Sector Contracts and the General Law of Subsidies, as well as other complementary regulations, which are exclusively applicable with respect to the procedures to which European funds are intended.
Specifically, the CEOE proposal aims to offer solutions through the following actions:
- Provide the units in charge of the execution and management of European funds with additional means to deal with this task, not only by tackling or minimizing operational bottlenecks, but also by generating synergies between these units, thanks to administrative documentation models extrapolables and to the preference given to the processing of these procedures.
- Shorten the processing times of the files and simplify their instruction. For example, suspending the need for all procedures to be classified as urgent. Thus, it is provided that those that are subject to this scope of application are processed directly within the deadlines established for files classified as urgent.
- In addition, the exclusion of the requirement of provisional guarantee, the generalization of responsible declarations and the use of electronic means is proposed.
- It is proposed to prevent certain procedures, such as prior inspection or accreditation of the existence of a budget credit, from preventing progress in the processing of contracts or grants, thereby saving time.
- The aim is to make the essential environmental control measures of certain projects compatible with the agility in the processing of the procedures destined to carry them out.
- Encourage the search in the private sector for transformational projects aligned with the objectives of the European Next Generation EU funds, given the revenues associated with being the first to propose these projects to the public sector. To this end, individuals are empowered to submit contract proposals that may be subject to the principles of the National Plan, accessing an additional score in their tender offer in order to encourage the submission of proposals by individuals.
- Streamline public-private collaboration, making the forms of inter-administrative collaboration and those of the public and private sectors more flexible through consortia with the aim that such collaboration allows a more efficient and effective use of European funds.
- Incorporate financial institutions into the streamlining mission, opening the possibility that they voluntarily submit to the corresponding collaboration agreement, when the regulatory bases so provide, to intervene in the grant award procedure, in order to process the the applications, the requirements analysis and the concession proposal.
