As Europe starts to build back from the Covid-19 pandemic, public social services and the people they work with are in critical need of support from policymakers. EU Member States have submitted national plans to access funding from the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) which include commitments to invest in, in a range of social priorities such as long-term care and child protection in the wake of the pandemic. Monitoring the RRF will play a crucial role in ensuring the promised reforms and investments are realised.
On 15 December 2021, the European Commission launched the Recovery and Resilience Scoreboard, a public online platform to show progress made in the implementation of the RRF as a whole, as well as the national recovery and resilience plans.
Setting objectives for Member States
The Scoreboard website catalogues the impact of the RRF through six policy pillars: Green Transition, Digital Transformation, Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, Social and Territorial Cohesion, Health, Economic, Social and Institutional Resilience, and Policies for the Next Generation.
The most relevant pillars for social services are ‘Cohesion’ and ‘Resilience’ because they breakdown the expenditure of the plans into policy areas such as social protection, integration of vulnerable groups, long-term care, and crisis preparedness.
On the basis of these pillars, the Commission has set milestones (qualitative implementation steps) and targets (quantitative implementation steps) for EU national governements to fulfil.
In addition, the Scoreboard includes a set of common indicators related to the objectives of the RRF, which the Commission can use to benchmark member states on the progress of their deliverables from their respective national plans.
Missing social indicators
The indicators related to the social pillars have a strong focus on employment and training, once again highlighting that investment in social policy is largely understood as activating the labour market. However, many people cannot participate in the labour market and require other forms of support, such as home care.
A marked absence in the Scoreboard is a lack of indicators for social inclusion, targets for transitions from institutional to community-based approaches to care and combatting staff shortages in the social sector. If these problems are not addressed there is a real danger that large proportions of the population severely and disproportionately impacted by the pandemic will be left behind in the recovery, because social services may become unable to provide continued quality support.
Indeed, in our 2021 publication on the impact of Covid-19 on social services, ESN reported that social services and social care directors and planners at the local level felt that, from the national perspective, social care was sometimes not a priority. The publication also highlighted that national guidance was not always accurate, that there was a lack of human and funding resources and, even when there was, these were slow to arrive.
ESN work on EU Funding
Since 2014, ESN has had an ongoing reference group on the EU semester with the aim of bringing social services to the forefront of the European Semester and ensuring social priorities are included in the policy cycle. With our newly Commission approved work programme for 2022-2025 this reference group will continue this work for the next four years.
We will look at the National Resilience and Recovery plans and aim to support reforms recommended to Member States in the EU semester process. Through our members, ESN will monitor if the investments and policy reforms conducted under the plans have had a positive impact in the social sector.