Funding for SME plans unresolved

Date: 04/07/1996

By Tim Jones

THE European Commission's integrated programme for small and medium-sized enterprises is meant to be bigger than the sum of its parts.

“It is a framework for all the EU's actions in this field, facilitating the coordination of policies but also making them more visible,” said a spokesman for Christos Papoutsis, the Commissioner responsible for SMEs.

The programme, which is due to be adopted by the full Commission next Wednesday (10 July), simply draws together all activities in favour of SMEs undertaken by member states and the Commission.

“Putting together all the different schemes is useful because it is not so easy to find all the initiatives they have, but it is just a collection - a list of the different initiatives,” said a spokesman for the SMEs' lobby group UEAPME.

This includes special funding projects of the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund, and schemes using money from the EU's Structural Funds and research and development budgets.

However, at the centre of the integrated programme is the so-called 'multi-annual initiative', which remains bogged down because of differences between the institutions over funding.

In March, industry ministers gave their approval to the ideas behind the programme for 1997-2000, but refused to endorse a 68-million-ecu increase in financing. Forty million ecu of this was due to come from the revision of the EU's financial perspectives rejected at last month's summit.

The SME associations had been hoping for a doubling of the programme's funding to 220 million ecu from the 112 million ecu in the previous programme.

The Parliament's economic committee will vote on the programme next Tuesday (9 July) and MEPs are due to approve it during their plenary meeting in September. However, member states are expected to approve a programme worth 140 million ecu rather than the 180 million ecu sought by the Commission.

“If they really want to put all their speeches about the importance of SMEs and their job-creating potential into practice, then they should approve all the money,” commented the SME spokesman.

Moreover, the SMEs claim to have spotted another hole in the Commission's plans. While all the different schemes are brought together to show the EU's overall approach to small companies, the projects remain separate within the Commission itself.

DGXXIII, the Directorate-General for SMEs, takes the lead in the area, but is responsible only for some parts of it.

“You can put it all together on paper,” said the UEAPME spokesman, “but you never really know whether the directorates are cooperating.”