European Union News - Social Affairs

According to the last data released by the European Statistical Office (Eurostat), housing conditions differ considerably between Member States. These differences can be seen both in the type of housing in which people live, either a flat or a detached house, as well as in the housing problems they encounter in terms of accessibility, overcrowding, or available facilities.

Nearly one in eight European households includes a child under the age of six. One in five of these children, who represent 19 million children, are at risk of poverty. For that reason, the European Commission has launched for the first time an action plan aimed at giving every child a better start in life and to lay the foundations for successful lifelong learning, social integration, personal development and employability later in life.

According to a resolution adopted by the European Parliament on 16 February, within the general context of economic crisis and progressive population ageing Europe is currently going through, it is crucial that Member States ensure that pension schemes can sustainably deliver an adequate income to the EU's growing number of retired people. The text approved in Plenary session also addresses issues such as pension's portability, as well as inequalities faced by women and older workers.

The EU has presented its agenda for reinforcing the right of the child. On this agenda are listed eleven actions that the European Commission will adopt in the coming years. This program implements the principles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU through specific actions on security policies and child welfare, including the promotion of justice more suited to smaller, more information children about their rights and try to make the Internet a safer space for them.

With a view to the presentation of the Commission's EU strategy for Roma inclusion, European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee outlined its priorities at its meeting on 14 February. These priorities include equal access to employment and education, protecting fundamental rights, better use of EU funding and involving Roma women in policy development.

The ERC Scientific Council has established a gender equality plan, based on the view that women and men are equally able to perform excellent frontier research. One of the main goals of this plan, which has been concluded by the ERC gender balance working group,  is to increase the number of female top researchers applying for ERC grants, by means of raising awareness.

The European Personnel Selection Office published on 4 February the results of the first new open competition to select generalist graduate 'Administrators' launched on 2010 as part of a programme of modernisation of the EU Institution selection procedure. This new procedure has allowed to speed up the selection process and reduce it from an average 2 years procedures to approximately 10 months.

European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee has backed Commission's proposal which establishes that the proposed single permit should be enough to enable third-country workers to live and work in the European Union and therefore allowing Member States to issue additional documents would defeat the whole purpose of the single permit. In their decision, members of the Committee backed the original Commission text on this and confirmed December's plenary vote on the employment issues.

The European Union and its Member States must act to ensure that pension schemes can sustainably deliver an adequate income to the EU's growing number of retired people, despite the economic crisis. This is one of the main points which focused a resolution voted within the Parliament's Employment Committee which also calls for pension portability to be addressed, as well as the inequalities faced by women and older workers.

According to the last data published by Eurostat seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for the euro area has remained at 10.0% in December 2010, unchanged compared with November. Figures for the European Union as a whole also remained unchanged towards previous month at 9.6% in December 2010.