At what point is the National Recovery and Resilience Plan

By 31 December, the Italian government will have to meet 52 deadlines agreed with the European Union to access the funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr). This is 10% of the 527 commitments planned for the next five years.

Where is Italy on the roadmap? Here is the point of the situation.

The PNRR was definitively approved by the EU on 13 July 2021, after months of work by the second Conte and Draghi governments. This is a plan with interventions for 235.1 billion euros, to be put in place by 2026.

Of these, 191.5 billion (122.6 are loans and 68.9 are non-repayable) come from the Recovery and resilience facility (Rrf), an EU fund to counter the economic crisis. Another 13 billion come from the React-Eu fund, dedicated to employment measures, while about 30.6 billion refer to a complementary fund, financed only with Italian resources.

The interventions of the NRP are divided into six missions, which are in turn divided into different components. The mission that receives the most money is the one dedicated to the ecological transition, with 59.5 billion. This is followed by that on digitization and innovation (40.3 billion), education and research (30.9 billion), infrastructures for sustainable mobility (25.4 billion), inclusion and social cohesion (19 , 8 billion) and health care (15.6 billion).

The NRP also rests on a series of reforms. Those of justice and public administration are the most important because they horizontally concern all the missions. Then there are the enabling reforms, such as that on competition: they are designed to ensure the full implementation of the plan and remove administrative and procedural obstacles. Sector reforms, on the other hand, such as that on the recruitment of teachers, are regulatory innovations to make specific sectors more efficient.

In addition, there are accompanying reforms, such as the tax one. The implementation of these reforms is not necessary to receive the funds of the NRP – hence their name – but according to the government they remain fundamental for the realization of the general objectives of the plan.

In the next five years our country will have to reach 213 goals (milestones, verified on the basis of qualitative results, such as the approval of individual regulatory measures) and 314 objectives (target, verified on the basis of quantitative results, such as the hiring of a specific number of staff in a given sector).

Every six months the EU will evaluate, with some flexibility, the commitments made by Italy to approve the disbursement of the funds, which will take place in ten installments. Over 24 billion has already been disbursed in August as pre-financing.

By September 30 this year, the government had to meet ten deadlines. The objective was achieved, except for the decree for the women’s enterprise fund, in support of female entrepreneurship, approved by the ministry of economic development a little late on 2 October. Among the commitments maintained, there are the decree on governance of the NRP – of which there are still twenty implementing decrees – and the decrees of the ministry of ecological transition on the circular economy and on the monitoring of hydrogeological instability.

However, the approval of individual measures is often only a first step. In the implementation of the NRP, a fundamental role is played by local administrations and regions, which must be ready for funding. In recent days, for example, the case of the Sicily region has been discussed, which has seen all 31 projects rejected for a tender on agricultural irrigation because they did not meet the necessary criteria.

According to a recent government monitoring, 42 deadlines must be met in the last three months of 2021. On some of these the executive seems to be already well advanced, on others less so.

As regards justice, for example, the draft law for the reform of the civil trial is being examined by the chamber (it was approved by the Senate on 21 September), while that for the reform of the criminal trial has been definitively approved by the parliament on 23 September. Once the enabling laws are enacted, the government will have one year to pass their legislative decrees. These measures will make it possible to concretely reform justice, within the terms of the delegation received from parliament.

Between investments and reforms, the ministry with the most work to do by 2021 is that of tourism: at the end of September it still had to define six out of six investments. The ministry, as it were, best placed was that of the public administration, having already achieved all three of its objectives with regard to reforms.

In all this, who has the task of monitoring and controlling the progress of the plan? This function falls on two subjects. On the one hand, there is the central PNRR service, set up at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, which acts as a contact point with the European Commission for the implementation of the plan. On the other side there is the control room chaired by the prime minister, with the competent ministers and undersecretaries, which met for the first time on 7 October. Every six months this body must submit a report on the progress of the NRP to parliament.

Curated by Carlo Canepa