Does the EU invest more in youth or not? – the answer remains unclear

Brussels, 12 February 2013 // The compromise reached last week by the European Council on the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2014-2020 is disappointing.

Discussions started off with a €1-trillion budget proposed by the European Commission, went down to €973 billion in November and now Member States decided to cut it down to €959 billion. This is the first time a EU budget is been cut in real terms.

“To survive the current crisis as well as to avoid creating a “lost” generation,” says Peter Matjašič, President of the European Youth Forum, “the EU needs to make youth a priority, and allocate adequate resources. The way out from the crisis requires more European leadership, not less, and young people deserve a European Union that invests in them.”

Compared to the current Financial Framework, the agreement reached by the European Council includes increasing investments in areas such as research and innovation as well as education, training and youth. Nevertheless this agreement actually constitutes a decrease of 24% budget allocation under Heading 1a, down from €152 652 million in the November (Initial EC proposal was €163 400 million) to €125.614 million.

“Besides the youth mainstreaming in the MFF, the actual budget of the ‘Erasmus for All’ programme (specific youth programme of the EU) is still unclear. This uncertainty does not honour the political will expressed by the European Council in the past to support young people,” continues Matjašič.

Furthermore, the European Youth Forum, together with the European Parliament, has repeatedly demanded to set youth as a priority in the EU budget and to mainstream youth issues within the MFF. The European Council failed to provide a clear answer to this in its proposal. The Youth Forum thus turns to the European Parliament to integrate a youth dimension in all the financial instruments to be decided with the Council.

The Forum is pleased to see that the Council agreed to commit to specific financial allocations aimed at tackling youth unemployment and that the Youth Guarantee recommendation is expected to be adopted soon.

However, the amounts and the targets foreseen in the 2014-2020 cycle as a follow-up to the Commission’s Youth Employment package risk being insufficient and unable to make any real impact. The €6 billion allocated is not sufficient in order to bring in an EU-wide Youth Guarantee and is unlikely to even be sufficient to tackle youth unemployment in the regions identified as having a youth unemployment rate that is higher than the EU average.

[ENDS]

Notes to the editor:

– The European Youth Forum’s LoveYouthFuture campaign aims at convincing decision makers to make youth a priority target in different EU funding programmes and at the same time, supports the work carried out by youth organisations at national level regarding youth policy and youth work funding. The European Youth Forum believes that with the EU budget we can direct our common money to policies that have long-term effect on the challenges that young people in Europe face and that are not national problems. www.loveyouthfuture.eu

– Read “EU budget: Less for cows, more for young people” – 7 February 2013

– Youth unemployment now exceeds the EU average of 25 percent in 13 of the EU’s 27 member states, while more than 50 percent of those aged 15-24 in Spain and Greece are out of work.

– The International Labour Organization calculated that an investment of €21 billion was required in order to bring in a Youth Guarantee in Europe. While the fact that the Council has recognized the need to invest in young people to tackle youth unemployment, the €6 billion foreseen is unlikely to be effective in ensuring the necessary re-structuring of employment and education services at a national level in order to adequately address the issue. Link here.