Bureaucracy hits progress on networks

Date: 09/11/1995

By Tim Jones

THE European Commission's services are putting the final touches to a report for December's Madrid summit complaining about continued hold-ups in the 14 priority trans-European networks (TENs).

“It's a general complaint about slow progress on the projects, with a special focus on regulatory and administrative obstacles,” said one official.

Criticism is understood to centre on regulatory delays to the ambitious 16-billion-ecu Brussels-Cologne-Amsterdam-London high-speed rail link, as well as the Brenner axis link from Verona to Munich.

Financing, which had often been cited by the Commission in the past as a major problem, is now being put to one side as attention focuses on other problems holding up progress on the projects.

“It can hardly be a problem with disbursement, since the money was only agreed at the beginning of October,” commented one official.

The delay comes as little surprise to European Investment Bank President Sir Brian Unwin, who is keen to emphasise that criticism for any hold-ups should be directed elsewhere.

“The Brenner link is perhaps the most ambitious and difficult of all. You've got to get the German, the Austrian, the Italian governments to agree exactly how this has to be done, who pays for it, who has the benefits and so on,” he said.

“The delays are not from financing. There are extremely difficult sets of questions such as those relating to the Brenner link, which is a line on the map concealing a whole range of intergovernmental problems, environmental problems and so on. It's not financing or the unwillingness of the EIB to look at it that is causing delays. It's a whole range of other factors.”

The EU budget's contribution of 2.345 billion ecu towards funding the 91-billion-ecu priority projects was agreed in September. This money is meant to be spent on feasibility studies, interest subsidies, loan guarantees and, very occasionally, block grants.

A meeting on 12 October of the newly-formed TENs Committee for Financial Aid approved spending on transport projects worth 182.5 million ecu.

In September, the EIB's board of directors approved its largest TENs loan so far, worth 600 million ecu, to help finance the 3.4-billion-ecu Øresund road and rail link between Denmark and Sweden.

Nevertheless, the sensitive question of TENs financing has not yet been laid to rest.

During the last meeting of the new financing committee in October, some member states complained that their bids for funding energy networks had not been adequately scrutinised by the Commission.

But for its part, the Commission is expected to want to make few waves over financing at the Madrid summit of EU leaders, despite its concerns over TENs, a reluctance which reflects the Commission's awareness of the controversy the issue has stirred up at past summits.

In the words of one diplomat who follows the financing question: “They are not disposed to make a great deal of it at Madrid. It could cause the kind of upsets we have seen in the past.”