Europe's ambitious goal of taking 20 million people out of poverty will only succeed if local and regional authorities play a key role in developing national programmes and if Europe is prepared to back national, regional and local authorities in their efforts, starting with sufficient funding through the European Social Fund. This was the key message in the Committee of the Regions' (CoR) opinion on the European Platform against poverty and social exclusion, adopted today at its plenary session in Brussels.

Christine Chapman, a member of the National Assembly for Wales and the CoR's rapporteur on the issue, welcomed the commitment to involve local and regional authorities in the development of national reform programmes, due to be published by member states in mid-April, but remained sceptical about the quality of the contributions.

Only a few days prior to the Committee's opinion, the Council welcomed Commission's integrated approach within the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion. On its side, the Committee of the Regions called on the European Commission to ensure that it gave sufficient support for national, local and regional authorities in their efforts to achieve the aims of this European flagship initiative part of the Europe 2020 Strategy. Since social policy is an area where Europe has no specific competence, the Commission will have to work in other ways to ensure that its goals are met – for example through ensuring that the European Social Fund is expanded to cover not only projects relating to employment but also to those that are designed to tackle poverty and exclusion, Chapman added.

There was also a broad consensus that the CoR should encourage the Commission to take a more active approach to tackling child poverty in particular. Chapman was particularly disappointed that the proposals from the Commission were not sufficiently ambitious in this area.  But she added that she was pleased to see specific references in the proposals to tackling the exclusion of Roma and to reducing homelessness, both key issues of the year that the CoR has presented on January 2011.

The Committee of the Regions' (CoR) opinion on the European Platform against poverty and social exclusion was developed with additional input from local and regional authorities across Europe on the basis of a survey carried out by the CoR's Europe 2020 Monitoring Platform. A key issue identified by a large majority of respondents to the survey was the extent to which investing in programmes designed to tackle poverty and exclusion should be made obligatory for local and regional authorities under future EU regional programmes, although some respondents felt that such an obligation would limit their potential to use EU funds for investing in other priority areas. The CoR's final opinion will however include the suggestion that funding for social exclusion issues should be made obligatory in the future.