“Thank you for the floor and I'll reply from the point of view of cohesion policy and then my colleague from AGRI from hers. So I mentioned that we're working in early stages on the right to stay strategy and I think also looking at the discussion here there is a point to be made about what is it that the commission can do and propose and what is the responsibility of member states and regions because these are extremely local matters, provision of services in remote and rural areas. So these are the things that we are talking about here. I don't think anybody really wants Brussels to come and say what must be done in any specific locality. Cohesion policy is good because it allows to look at each territory's own assets and opportunities. So it doesn't have a ready box of, you know, these are the ten things that you must do and then life is good. It works with the regions and it looks at what is available there, you know, what opportunities really are. So in the context of the right to stay strategy, and as I said we are in the early stages when we're thinking of what is it that the commission can do, and the right to stay strategy will come at a time when we hope to be in the middle of the discussions with member states on their national regional partnership plans where we very much hope the regional level will be very closely involved and speak up to make sure that all the regions get their chapters and they can address the issues which are important to them. And then we will come with the right to stay strategy to inform those negotiations and that discussion. And the things that we hope to cover in the right to stay strategy, I think the commission from the years of experience and working on harnessing talent, we see that we could bring forward the good, the positive examples of what has worked in regions where maybe the demographic situation looks really hopeless at the starting point but we can show there are ways of turning this around and make this knowledge available to other regions so that they could get the support from their national regional partnership plan and multiply and reuse these valuable lessons that we have learned from other regions. Data has been mentioned and it is a cornerstone. I think this is where commission could add value and maybe create common dashboards and bring data, make it more accessible and more usable so that anybody in a municipality would be able to zoom in and see how they're doing and then make wise decisions and choices on the basis of that. So I think because data is expensive to develop and making it user friendly doesn't need to be, you know, everybody does something in their own corner. We could look at if we have the resources to do that from the EU level working with Eurostat to make that available and accessible to all, all the way to the smallest regions. We could maybe find a way to get regions in similar situations, some that have tested solutions, to work with each other directly because they are the best places to learn from somebody that has done it before. I think there is work to be done in the area of financial instruments and microcredit, credit for female entrepreneurs. These are all areas that are eligible from cohesion policy today and could be funded also from the next national regional partnership plans. But to show the models, to show the examples, make it easier for member states to implement such financial instruments and give microcredit or proper credit to female entrepreneurs, I think this is something that we could look at. But the starting point, and this is where you can all also help to pass the message, has to be in the reality of the demographic change and facing that reality, not ignoring it. Sometimes, and I'm relatively new into this policy area, I'm getting the feeling that because policies are made by people who live in cities and the demographic change is in numbers, and if they don't visit and really experience the emptiness of countryside, which is not okay, it's good for biodiversity, biodiversity, but if you see empty houses, if you see places that used to be lively twenty years ago and now no longer are, I think that impacts the policymaking more than just looking at the graphs of the data. So I think this is where we have a lot of work to do for all of us in making sure that the demographic reality we have, ten other priorities, but if we don't make long term investments based on the demographic reality, we will end up spending the money inefficiently into things that we can't keep up in the long run. So again, this is something that I hope we can put into the right to stay strategy but it is certainly an area where the help in getting the message across the demographic realities here is now today, we have to take it into account in policymaking and planning of funding. That would be much appreciated. So I pass the floor to my AGRI colleague.”
Cohesion and rural funding · EU competences on demographic policy · EU policy on urban development
“Thank you, Chair. I'm afraid my AGRI colleague hasn't arrived yet with their presentation and that was supposed to be, I think, the more substantial point from DG Regio where we are in charge of cohesion policy which of course covers all regions including more rural, more especially populated regions. The issue of depopulation, which is closely related to women's presence in rural areas and especially those of younger women, cohesion policy is addressing the depopulation issue already today and quite thoroughly with an important caveat that our actions are not specifically targeting specific groups or segments of the population such as young women or others. We are looking more from the point of view of territories and how to ensure that each region makes the most out of its potentials. So a few things to mention, there is of course the wider support from cohesion policy that allows making sure there are quality jobs available all over the European Union, that there are services available that includes also education, access to health care but also very importantly broadband and other infrastructure networks. So all of this support is available and it is being widely used in the regional programs and also international programs. A second very important element to mention is the currently ongoing Harnessing Talent platform and the support offered in that for a total of eighty-nine regions where we work through different work streams with selected regions which have been identified to be in what we call a talent development trap. But in simple terms, this is about depopulation and losing the workforce in these regions. We are working with the help of OECD and others giving hands-on support to these regions to help them identify where their strengths and opportunities are in order to either make life in the region more attractive so that people wouldn't leave or attracting them back or attracting new people. We know very well one of the good outcomes of COVID is the wider possibility of telework and there are opportunities in there but there are also opportunities in the silver economy because we know that the population in these regions often is aging. It doesn't always need to mean doom and gloom and the hopeless situation. What we see from the Harnessing Talent platform and working directly with the regions and the people on the ground with a little bit of outside support, we're able to help them determine a way forward looking at their own assets and the opportunities that are present on the ground and a positive outcome is quite possible to come out of that. Maybe a few examples of what works and this project is going to reach its end in spring next year. We are planning to have a big conference in May and after that to spread all the lessons learned and outcomes. But for example, very interestingly, if you want to prevent young people from leaving countryside, it is important to get them engaged with local companies through internships, you know, summer engagements so that they can see their future and the employers get kind of early access to potential workforce. So interesting lessons how this has been done in several regions. Secondly, it's very often assumed that it is important for people to have jobs and then they will stay. We see that it is very important that in addition to jobs there are of course services available, especially when you talk about young women. They need to be sure that there is somewhere to put children while they work if work is available. But beside jobs, we also see that especially for young people it's very important that a strong community exists, a community where people who live there feel that they are empowered in making changes and improving the local life. So when policymakers are thinking about, okay, what solutions should we be offering, is it enough if we attract a company and create jobs? Our answer from the Harnessing Talent platform is that there needs to be more. We need to look at a more integrated, more systematic way at the full horizon of what makes life livable and enjoyable in these regions. So indeed the Harnessing Talent works with the regions that are right now in the middle of the demographic decline. They are looking at aging populations losing especially the cohorts which are right now in the prime of their life in the working age and we are figuring out solutions with them and those solutions can be funded from cohesion policy and they are being funded either from today or from the future. Now it's also very important and we've learned that again from the Harnessing Talent that all good policy starts from good data. We have seen cases where policymaking is skewed and investments are not made in the best way and most efficient way because the politicians are sometimes very optimistic about the future. And when it comes to demographic change, it is crucially important that the demographic reality is the starting point of policymaking, that we look the numbers in the eye and we recognize that there is not going to be an increase naturally without doing anything or even if we do something we might be able at best to stop the decline. So cases where, you know, in a small town a new mayor comes in and says, well, in the next ten years my population will double, therefore I'm going to build a swimming pool, this is not the best way to make policy and spend scarce public resources. So we are helping the regions and this is something we want to take out more widely to make sure that everybody has access to the best possible data to make sure that their policies are really rooted projections of population going up, down or staying stable and this must be the good starting point. There is an interesting JRC Joint Research Center of the Commission study currently going on also looking at the reasons of why young people leave rural areas. I think many people think, well, we don't need a study because we know but it is also very important to look at it neutrally, systematically based on data. And interestingly, some of the early findings that they've told me from this study are showing that young women are most likely to leave straight after school. So they go to bigger cities in search of better opportunities for education and better opportunities for employment because the data also shows that in rural areas men are more likely to be employed than women and women have systematically problems with accessing services, not to mention also the divide, the gap in higher education attainment levels between women and men in rural areas. So they go to the bigger places and bigger cities to have a more fulfilling life and I think that is quite understandable. And if we want to reverse or fix, we shouldn't probably be looking at how to keep the women there but we have to look at what makes them leave. On the positive side, people do come back to rural areas. So here we talked about women that leave when they're in their twenties but once there are families, once there are children, people tend to go back to rural areas for all the qualities of fresh air, the space, the perhaps more secure living environment and there are opportunities in that movement and policymakers could be looking at, okay, how do we make this return or move to rural areas more smooth, create opportunities, make sure childcare places are available to attract them back. And then there is another wave of people going back once they retire again getting away from maybe the busyness and the lousy life. Again, opportunities there, let's not, you know, silver economy is an economy, there are opportunities there and again it is something that we could be looking at and these are all areas of investment where cohesion policy is available and we're happy to help regions figure out the way. So maybe I stop here and I finally would only say that the Executive Vice President Fito has been asked to come out with a strategy on right to stay so we are now in a preparatory evidence collection phase and we're very interested to hear your views and there will be a call for evidence coming in a few months so we are very much interested in all systematized analyzed information you might have to offer on this topic. Thank you very much.”
Cohesion and rural funding · EU policy on brain drain · EU competences on demographic policy