First Committee Meetings and Focus on Youth

Following the EU elections, the newly elected MEPs had their first committee meetings last week. The attention of the Youth Forum has been especially focused on the committees of Culture and Education (CULT) and the Employment and Social Affairs Committee (EMPL), both working areas highly related youth.

The Forum would first like to congratulate the new Chairs of each committee, respectively Thomas Händel for EMPL and Silvia Costa for CULT. The Forum is looking forward to working with them as with all the other newly elected MEPs to build a future full of youth rights.

MEPs discussed the budget with a special focus on programmes such as Creative Europe, Europe for Citizens and Erasmus+ during the CULT meeting. While the EU had increased its funding for the education programme Erasmus+ by about 40%, the envelope of the citizenship programme got reduced by 20% for the new period 2014-2020. Members of the CULT committee regret this fact and also that the 2015 annual budget was further decreased – in a year of European elections.

The Forum also supports the MEPs in their role to ensure that the EU sticks to its important financial commitments concerning Erasmus+, enabling more and more young people in Europe to benefit from an educational experience abroad.

During the EMPL committee meeting, the Labour Minister Guiliano Poletti presented priorities of the Italian Presidency, which included a focus on youth unemployment and mobility of the unemployed through the European Employment Services.

The Forum welcomes the fact that the MEPs of the EMPL committee called for more concrete measures and highlighted that labour market mobility is not a solution in itself and that a mismatch of skills also needs to be tackled.

With the current job market, the Forum supports freedom of movement but not forced mobility and also stresses the importance of investing in quality education and training which could help combat the skills mismatch and offer equal chances for young people to grow as citizens and live an autonomous life.