In the context of the upcoming EU budget, Malta needs to make a “quantum leap” in order to obtain funds which are directly managed by the European Commission, Parliamentary Secretary for European Funds and Social Dialogue Aaron Farrugia said on Monday.

Speaking to during a press conference about Malta’s work plan for the upcoming year in terms of EU funds, Farrugia said that the country will need to undertake three major actions in order to reach its goals.

The first, he said, is to continue to centralise and consolidate Malta’s EU funding network.  He noted that the European Union Programmes Agency (EUPA) and the EU Paying Agency had already moved under his portfolio from the Ministry for Education and Employment and the Ministry for Finance respectively.

Work in this regard will continue over the next weeks or months, he said while noting that because Malta is small as it is it cannot have diverse entities working over each other.

The European Union Programmes Agency (EUPA), which is responsible for the Erasmus+ programme and the European Solidarity Corps, will also be comprehensively reformed, Farrugia noted. The challenges here, Farrugia said, will not decrease – in fact they will increase, especially given the fact that the budget for Erasmus+ programmes is set to double as part of the EU’s next Multi-Annual Financial Framework.

To alleviate this, a full-blown reform will take place, with the government look at agencies in countries such as Ireland, Germany, and Austria for best practice which can be adapted for use in Malta.

Another action that Malta will be working on will be in making the aforementioned “quantum leap” towards competing for EU direct funding.  Indirect funding is that which is administered by each country, but direct funding comes straight from the EU through a multitude of programmes such as Horizon, LIFE+, InvestEU, and Digital Europe amongst others.

To this effect, Farrugia announced that as of January 2020, a new specialised unit which will be responsible for aiding entities in submitting bids for certain direct funding – which can be won by any other entity in any other EU country – from the EU.

Finally, Farrugia noted, the government will be commissioning a study to analyse the role that EU funds has had in the transformation of Malta, both from an economic sense and a social sense.  The results of this study, he said, will aid the government in planning and investing the upcoming EU funds under the next EU budget, which will run between 2021 and 2027.

He said that it was “highly unlikely” that the next Multi Annual Financial Framework – which is, in essence, the EU’s budget – will be agreed upon this year, but noted that he was hoping that it would be ready next year.

He said that Malta is working for a fair deal not only in terms of amount but also in terms of how the funds should be invested.  Farrugia added that he was already in contact with the European Commission and had found common ground on where these funds should be invested.