The end of the year is an important stage in the calendar of the national recovery and resilience plan (Pnrr), i.e. the proposal presented by Italy to the European Union to spend the funds managed through the Next generation Eu fund, also called the Recovery fund, activated to support the European economy after the crisis caused by the pandemic.
In fact, the fourth quarter ends in December and it is the moment in which the government can ask the European Union for a new release of funds, which are disbursed every six months only if the foreseen intermediate objectives have been achieved, up to a total of 191 5 billion euros by 2026, the highest figure obtained by a member state.
But the data to verify that everything is going as planned is not there, as denounced by the organizations of the Data common good campaign, which since the presentation of the plan to the European Commission almost two years ago have been asking for maximum transparency on the management of funds and projects. On November 30, the organizations sent a letter to the government led by Giorgia Meloni to ask for compliance with the commitments made in terms of transparency and monitoring of the implementation of the plan, an issue that has not been debated even in public until today and was completely absent from the annual event jointly organized by the Italian authorities and the European Commission which was held on 2 December 2022.
In reality, the problems of lack of transparency related to the Pnrr emerged immediately, already with the Draghi government, when the associations had denounced the impossibility of accessing the documents presented in Brussels by the former prime minister in April 2021 with the Latest updated proposals for the European Commission.
The 2021 budget law would actually oblige the government to publish the financial, physical and procedural implementation data relating to each project, but this has never happened in a timely manner.
Today the place to go to look for the available data is a portal called Italy tomorrow, which went online on 3 August 2021 without a real publication of data in open format, with little additional information compared to the plan presentation document already available on the government website , and with a restrictive copyright license to reuse content, in contrast with the characteristics of public and open data which should guarantee transparency and access to information for citizens and citizens.
There is no single, open place to find and consult the data sheets of these projects
In October 2021, documents had appeared for the first time on the “open data” page, as requested by civil society, but the organizations had denounced that these were unusable versions, because there was once again a license that would allow it, and in addition, they were simple spreadsheets renamed in a reusable format, but then uploaded to the site without attention to form, with rows left empty, columns without values and textual information present in parts of the document that should have been dedicated only to data.
Today, at the threshold of Italy’s request for a third tranche of investments, the license for use has been updated, but only about five thousand of the 73 thousand projects presented are present on the portal (in fact the last document uploaded in this regard dates back to 2021). and other more detailed information is updated to August 2022 but only with regard to four tender procedures for a total value of around one billion euros, while the value of ongoing projects according to the report presented by the Draghi government to parliament at the beginning of October is 65 billion.
Therefore, there is no accessible place in which to find and consult the data sheets of these projects, also to verify the impact on the environment and compliance with the “transversal priorities” envisaged by the plan to “reduce the territorial, generational and gender gaps present in the country”, as written on the plan website.
Who should collect the data
According to the provisions of the decree of 15 September 2021, it is the general accounting office of the state that has the task of monitoring the data uploaded by the “registered central administrations” (the ministries) and by the implementing entities (such as the regions, municipalities, cities and other entities responsible for implementing the projects) and to make them accessible to all, with responsibility for verifying and completing the data transmitted. The data must be entered directly by the “subjects responsible for the interventions” on a monthly basis.
“It seemed that the problem was of a technical nature at the beginning, and somehow we had confirmation of this in the last report to parliament, where it is written in black and white that the Regis platform, the one destined to collect monitoring data, is been completed, the information has been uploaded in part, but is not processed and made available, because it is subject to verification, and the data is not reliable”, explains Vittorio Alvino, president of the Openpolis foundation, one of the promoters of the campaign.
It is also the government that does not have the big picture of what is happening
The situation that emerges by retracing the history of the portal and of the published data is that it is no longer just a matter of lack of transparency, i.e. decisions taken by the government not to promptly communicate the data available to the public, but a lack of management of this flow of information.
“The point is the administrative capacity to support the process”, says Alvino, and it seems that the current government has not expressed any position in this regard. “Not only do observers outside the administration, such as civil society, the productive and trade union world, those who do research, lack basic information on how we are spending the funds, but if this is data management, it is the government itself that does not have the information to get the overall picture of what is happening. When discussing the transition between governments, and the management of delays, the discussion takes place without data and information”.
To facilitate the monitoring of data and the progress of public spending, both Openpolis and the Action Aid organization, which is part of the Common Good Data campaign, had envisaged observatories available to civil society, OpenPnrr and Pnrr Civic Observatory, which however are blocked by the lack of available data on which to base monitoring.
They were created with the same principle as Monithon, an independent initiative born in 2013 for the civic monitoring of public policies in Italy and in Europe, based on European cohesion funds, where instead transparency was guaranteed through the data collection of the OpenCoesione portal. Why this difference? “What emerges from the lack of transparency of the Pnrr is the inadequacy of the administrative system to manage both ordinary and extraordinary processes, management, monitoring and reporting processes”, continues Alvino.
“Almost two years after its launch, the resources available are inadequate”, confirms Alberto Pampalone, head of the Action Aid Observatory. “At the moment we can only count on the data made available by the entities that we contact individually, such as the municipality of Bologna, where we held the first monitoring school”.
To obtain the new tranche of funds, Italy must demonstrate that it has already carried out the planned reforms and achieved the project objectives. The reforms “are quite simple” to develop, says Pampalone, because they are laws and regulations that can be approved by the government or by the parliament, while “from 2023 the target objectives are quantitative and concern investments, tenders to be carried out, projects to be implemented , kilometers of railways to be built, schools to be renovated”, and therefore require more spending and implementation capacity.
Declan Costello, Deputy Director of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, confirmed at the December 2 event that adjustments for inflation may be made to the plan, but that the 2026 deadline is confirmed and commitments need to be continued. by that date.
Observing the current situation, it does not seem that new strategies have been implemented with respect to the previous government so that the machine proceeds more efficiently. And we don’t even have the data to understand how much money has actually already been spent, which projects have yet to start and where to intervene to improve the process. We proceed in the dark and risk doing so until 2026.