“Out-of-the-box solutions” needed
Portugal’s minister for cohesion said on Wednesday that the government is “going against the clock” and adopting “out-of-the-box solutions” to meet the deadlines of its Recovery and Resilience Plan (shortened to PRR in Portuguese).
In front of the members of the Local Government Committee at the parliament in Lisbon, where he was called at Chega’s request, Castro Almeida took stock of the state of EU funds via the PT 2020, PT 2030, and the PRR programmes, confessing that the latter currently “makes him sleep the least” because, at the halfway point of the deadline, it has an execution rate of around 20%, and that’s “being optimistic”.
“I can assure you that the PRR was not going to be fulfilled on time. With the changes we’re going to make, let’s see if we can fulfil it,” said Manuel Castro Almeida, pointing to the previous government’s organisational problems because it should have launched tenders for works “more than a year ago”.
However, he said he hoped that by the end of the year, “we won’t be talking about delays”.
“You have to go a little outside the box to fulfil the PRR,” he said, pointing out that there is “a lot of pressure of time” and that, therefore, “you have to invent some less traditional or non-traditional solutions here” so that deadlines can be met.
The minister said that “people are needed to work” and suggested using universities and polytechnics and even artificial intelligence to analyse applications.
On the other hand, he advocated simplifying procedures, such as the term of responsibility that he is negotiating with the municipalities so that the construction of more housing can be speeded up, bypassing the more time-consuming bureaucracy.
“We’re going to do the same with health centres, which otherwise wouldn’t be ready on time. There’s a similar procedure with schools. We’re talking about more than €2 billion worth of work that will be contracted now, during the month of June, so that the councils can open the tenders so that they can lay the foundations in the autumn. (…) And so it’s really against the clock,” he reiterated.
He also defended the need to reduce payment deadlines: “We are taking measures so that by the end of this year we will have no more than 60 days to analyse a payment request and no more than 30 days to respond to a payment request,” he said.
Castro Almeida stressed the difficulty of carrying out a “large concentration of works” on the ground, including housing, schools, and health centres, and acknowledged that it may be difficult to find enough manpower to meet the proposed targets.
He also warned of the consequences that delays in implementing the PRR could have for the country, such as the €713 million that has been withheld by Brussels due to non-compliance with targets and emphasised that the country could have even greater withholdings in the fifth disbursement request due to lack of implementation.
Source: LUSA
