Pnrr, a control room urgently convened for the fourth installment: what to know

The 19 billion of the third installment of the Pnrr should arrive as soon as possible, perhaps during the week, the time to carry out the last checks on the construction of university accommodation, the last obstacle to obtaining the green light from Brussels: «I can tell you that the Commission will never proceed to a disbursement if the objectives are not met. The Italian authorities are working and I think the exercise will end shortly» said Paolo Gentiloni yesterday. The real problem – a very serious problem on the public finances front, because there are another 16 billion euros at stake – concerns the fourth installment of the Pnrr, which according to Commission sources consulted by La Stampa will be «very difficult to be collected within the year”.
First of all because as of 30 June the government failed to meet all 27 deadlines set for the first semester and even when – it is pointed out – it will take the Commission two months to assess the effective achievement of all the targets, and a the European Council will take another month to deliberate. If, unfortunately, 8 months like the ones needed to obtain (hopefully) the third installment should pass in this case as well, Brussels could issue the new check only in the spring of 2024. A problem for the government, and in particular for the Treasury , already grappling with a requirement that in June more than doubled compared to 2022, reaching 95 billion, and which therefore will have to meet such a significant amount in another way with new issues of public debt securities.

For today, a control room has been urgently convened which has the “review of the fourth installment” of the Pnrr on its agenda. The meeting to deal with this new emergency will be held at Palazzo Chigi, in the Sala Verde.

According to the monitoring of Openpolis updated to 27 June, out of the 27 deadlines envisaged, 17 as of 30 June were still to be completed. The delays, above all due to the failure to issue the implementing decrees, concern in particular the interventions in the field of ecological transition (7), the public administration (4, 3 taking into account that the new Presidential Decree on public competitions arrived on the wire and will enter into force on July 14), social inclusion and work and business (3). Of the 17 deadlines still to be met, only 4 according to available information are close to completion.
Of the four deadlines linked to the ecological transition, three are expected to be remodulated. Another late deadline concerns the entry into force of the reform of the public procurement code, for which three implementing decrees were missing at the time of monitoring. The deadline that provided for the award of all the tenders for cloud enablement of the public administration also needs to be completed, in this case a tender is still open whose closure is scheduled for July 21st.
The government, which is working on an overall revision of the Plan, in the third report to Parliament on the state of implementation of the Pnrr had explicitly referred to some deadlines that presented critical issues, delays and the need for remodulation. One of these concerns the awarding of contracts for the purchase of clean trains, limited by general weaknesses in the use of hydrogen as a vector of renewable energy. Other difficulties, as is well known, are linked to interventions in kindergartens. The other three deadlines identified as problematic are all in the hands of the Ministry of the Environment: the first concerns building renovation with Superbonus and Sismabonus, on which the changes would serve to avoid the ineligibility of some types of expenses. The second involves the award of all contracts for hydrogen-based refueling stations (35 out of 40 projects awarded). Finally, the third concerns the installation of electric charging stations: to date 4,700 projects have been examined out of the 21,000 expected by 2026.
There are also difficulties on the front of social interventions: yesterday the Third Sector Forum reported that 1.32 billion euro instead of 1.45 billion euro had been allocated in favor of fragile people. In practice, 89 fewer projects have been financed than those foreseen due to the difficulties of the territories in presenting a sufficient number of projects, and above all the envisaged constraint of 40% of the resources destined for the South has so far been disregarded. And so, delay after delay, the Pnrr struggles and Italy risks losing the funds of the Plan or, if it goes well, cashing them with a long delay.