The European parliament and the recovery and resilience dialogue: An early assessment

Key Points

• The most financially significant element of the EU's collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), requires robust accountability mechanisms to ensure that it meets its aims and supports projects that 'do no significant harm'.

• The European Parliament plays a central role in the horizontal accountability of the RRF through its right to receive relevant documents and information regarding the facility and through its bimonthly Recovery and Resilience Dialogues with the European Commission.

• The five Recovery and Resilience Dialogues held to date have provided the European Parliament with an opportunity to question relevant Commissioners about the RRF. But the effectiveness of the dialogue has been hindered by a lack of transparency about these meetings and limited public documentation and information about how the facility works.

• The European Parliament would help to improve transparency and hence accountability by publishing minutes of Recovery and Resilience Dialogues, as it does for its Monetary Dialogue with the European Central Bank.

• The European Parliament should invite the Commission to publish a database of all projects financed through the RRF, in keeping with best practice among public financial institutions, such as the European Investment Bank