The strange insistence of Brussels bureaucrats on student accommodation (which blocks Pnrr funds) – Corriere.it

ended up that at a certain point an Italian official, in the umpteenth meeting with the Brussels counterparts on National recovery plan, made a proposal. We are all learning, we to spend and you to control our spending – he would have said to his European colleagues -. But at least try to let us know as soon as possible what information you need to carry out your checks.

why one of the problemsalmost six months after the request for payment of the third installment of the 19 billion euro PnrrThat the lens keeps moving forward. Not only the payments: also the accumulation of ever new and sometimes curious requests for details from officials of the Directorate General Recover of the European Commission.

In particular, on the relatively limited dossier for which the entire 19 billion installment remains blocked: 7,500 student beds, 300 million euros. What started as a project with European money to give young people the opportunity to study away from home seems, at times, to turn into a labyrinth of ever new bureaucratic conditions to be met.

In this matter the Italian government certainly slipped on a series of underestimations. In Rome, it was not understood in time that announcing a rewrite of the Pnrr for months, without providing any details, would have disoriented and irritated the counterparts in Brussels. At times exchanges at a political level have been confused with punctual and detailed work, the only thing that interests the technical interlocutors. N helps that too many Italian interlocutors do not agree to discuss in English: None of these slips help put the comparison on sliding rails.

But recently the ever new series of requests from Brussels on student residences, in particular, it is beginning to disorient even the negotiators in Rome. Initially, the spot checks on the assignment of the 7,500 beds had revealed minimal inaccuracies, but capable of blocking everything: wrong matriculation numbers of the beneficiary students, wrong house numbers in some addresses of the residences.

Once these minute issues have been resolved, the Brussels technicians have raised other doubts. They wanted to make sure that the private owners of university residences were subject to binding changes in the use of their properties, for example from hotels to student residences. And the university ministry has also responded to this dilemma by showing the contracts. Finally, two weeks after their last visit to Rome, European officials surprisingly presented one more question: how it is verified that the places created by private individuals, who receive Pnrr funds for this, are then really assigned to students and not rented to others?

The ministry reacted by sending the rankings of the beneficiaries; Brussels replied that it is not enough; the government countered by asking instead what is enough.

The Rome-Brussels correspondence is now a bit Kafkaesque, but the government does not agree to receive the payment of the installment without the 300 million students because it believes it is in good standing. Certainly, waiting to have the installment, and without too much liquidity in the treasury coffers, in turn it is not paying the anticipated advances on the work of the Pnrr to project implementers such as municipalities or broadband companies. Therefore, construction sites also slow down.