The European Social Services Index (SSI) is an initiative launched by the European Social Network (ESN) in 2023 to better understand and compare the situation of social services in different European Union (EU) Member States.

Each year, with the support of our SSI Working Group, we gather national data about several countries’ social services legislation, expenditure, and coverage. In 2025, we collected data from 16 countries: Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.

The data collected helps us provide evidence for the European Commission to formulate its recommendations to national governments within the framework of the European Semester – an annual review of national economic, social, and budgetary policies aimed at identifying socio-economic challenges in EU Member States and formulating proposals on how they could address these. ESN gets involved in this process to ensure that the European Commission fully knows the situation of social services and that its recommendations meet social services’ needs. 

This meeting will bring together the members of our SSI Working Group and European Commission officials to discuss the evidence we gathered and assess how this can be used to feed into the European Semester.