| DG SANCO: Has the Commission learned the lessons from the independent 2006 evaluation of their funding strategies in Consumer Protection Networking of NGOs? |
DG SANCO Call FOR APPLICATIONS FOR FINANCIAL SUPPORT 2008
Like every year DG SANCO publishes its call for financial support for networking in consumer policy. This is also the case for 2008 where ECRC will again try to get their support for it vast networking activities in consumer protection in fiancial services. The Commission encourages such submissions with the following text:
"The Commission provides financial support for the activities of European Consumer Organisations. These are non-governmental, non-profit making, independent of industry, commercial and business or other conflicting interests, and have as their primary objectives and activities the promotion and protection of the health, safety and economic interests of consumers in the Community. A complete definition of the eligibility criteria, including representativeness membership, sources of founding and internal rules is included in the text of the call for applications below.
Applications must be entered by 28 September 2007 at the latest."
But in practice such support has been denied to our conferences since our last conference in 2000 in Gothenborg. As reported earlier also this year Commissioner Kuneva just like her predecessors denied such support. In her letter to the organisers she told ECRC that there were no funds available and that she was personally not able to open our September conference where about 80 different stakeholder organisations on responsible credit will be present.
EVALUATION REPORT BY CSIL MILAN
As this is our fifth or sixth attempt to get support from the competent EU-institution in consumer protection on this programme we came across a report from the Centre for Industrial Studies, Milan 2006 on the “Evaluation of financial contributions 2000-2003 to European Consumer organisations (Restricted invitation to tender No. SANCO/2004/B1/027 Final Report May 2006) mandated by DG SANCO itself.
This report seems to support our case and we wonder what the Commission has learned from it.
BANKING AND FINANCE: TOO LITTLE SUPPORT
CSIL found that DG SANCO concentrated its funding on two organisations: the European Umbrella Consumer Organisation BEUC and an organisation called ANEC which is representing consumer organisations in a specific area, the standardisation of goods and services. The report states:
“Source of funds: the DG SANCO grant is the only source of funds (except a 5% of
EFTA contributions) for ANEC, while for BEUC it is one of a number of sources. The DG SANCO grant contributed an average of 35% of total BEUC income in the period considered.“
The report then especially addresses the issues of “general interest, banking and insurance” where it proposes more funding activities by DG SANCO. It says with its 4th recommendation:
“4. From the long-term perspective, the Commission and BEUC should move in new directions with regard to their relationship. The evaluation team thinks that BEUC should substantially increase its budget in order to enable itself to cope with future challenges on a number of issues, for example: services of general interest, banking and insurance. These are highly technical issues, where various EU institutions play an important role and BEUC currently does not have enough resources to launch research into these issues. …”
It then proposes to fund more actors in this area with its 6th recommendation which if known at that stage would target especially the European Coalition for Responsible Credit which does not want to pete but collaborate with umbrella organisations and especially has successfully build links between consumer and other stakeholder organisations in banking and finance.
COOPERATION BETWEEN CONSUMER AND NON-CONSUMER NGOs
“6. The Commission should prepare itself to deal in future with a plurality of actors in lobbying and advocacy activities in the interests of EU consumers. The movement is evolving and relying on just one representative umbrella organisation may expose the EC to missing the future changes in the arena of consumer protection. The Commission is already committing resources to training and capacity building activities for national consumer organisations. The issue is however how to encourage networking at EU level, e.g. offering incentives for the establishment of networks of non-governmental organisations focussing on specific consumer issues. This would be probably more feasible and effective than creating other general purpose European consumer organisations, directly competing with BEUC. … Case studies demonstrate that there are some areas where co-actions by European consumer organisations and non (mainly)-consumer NGOs provided effective lobbying strategies. Given that, the evaluators suggest that the Commission should investigate the opportunity of revising the eligibility criteria for funding running costs under actions 16 and 17 in order to extend eligibility to thematic networks of both consumer and some types of non (mainly)- consumer organisations committed to specific issues relevant to the Consumer Policy Strategy . This broadening of the eligibility criteria would also be consistent with the Consumer Strategy objective to integrate consumer issues in all EU policies. Alternatively, the EC should consider splitting its support between one grant scheme for general-purpose or generic independent European Consumer Organisations and a different grant mechanism for more broadly defined NGO’s networks that focus on specific consumer issues.”
As the report also states that BEUC is more reactive than proactive on key issues while ANEC has a low visibility we learn from the report that such exclusive relations between DG SANCO and two organisations may cause a problem where other organisations take a quite critical stand on EU consumer policy. |
| ID: |
39892 |
| Author(s): |
UR |
| Publication date: |
04/07/07 |
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Created: 04/07/07. Last changed: 04/07/07.
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