Because the student housing debate is a dangerous spy for the Pnrr

The difficulties in knowing where we are in the Pnrr also depend on the difficulties in reading the monitoring data but the government, now 6 months after taking office, should know everything. Investment monitoring is essential because the six-monthly result targets are a constraint for EU payments (by the way, the third tranche that was supposed to be paid by the hour is not yet there). A specific monitoring system called ReGIS has been set up for the Pnrr: not to predict delays (this is not the task of the monitoring system but if anything of the ministries!) but to have an overview of all projects semester by semester. ReGIS is much more accurate and complete than the standard investment monitoring system and, like any innovation, it has aroused criticism from the technicians of the implementing bodies (often municipal) who have to carry out the reporting with new and more complicated criteria. It must be simplified but it is obvious that it requires more steps: the PNRR is European money with specific criteria and times. At the basis of everything is the Single Project Code (CUP). In administrative documents and databases, the CUP is practically the “tax code” of each investment: not only public works but also entrepreneurial subsidies, training and investments in research. For example, the expansion of a hospital constitutes a “public investment project” but at the same time there may be maintenance, a project assignment, concessions of some kind. For this reason, for each “project” there are multiple CUPs. The CUP database is linked to that of Anac (the National Anti-Corruption Authority) which contains information on tenders and that of the Ministry of the Treasury on payments. It is therefore possible to follow each investment from the moment it is scheduled, then executed and finally paid. So what is the problem with monitoring? Many CUPs are issued and remain inactive because perhaps the tenders have not been proceeded with. To understand how many are really active you have to wait until there is a CIG (Tender Identification Code) which indicates the calling of the tender. Many municipalities have many small-scale investments because the Pnrr also finances urban regeneration projects that were already in place before the Pnrr (such as railway investments or in industry 4.0). It was also a deliberate choice to spend the money faster, in fact it would have been inconceivable to start all investments in 2022 and finish them in 2026 if you did not fit into the continuous flow of investment spending already in place. Now it is difficult to move projects already hinged to other sources of financing. Rather, we need to simplify the procedures especially if we are dealing with projects already set up before the Pnrr.