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Last Wednesday morning [20 January] Social Platform was invited for an exchange of views on the the EU’s upcoming economic and social priorities with the Social Protection Committee, a committee composed of Member States’ experts and Commission officials which supports the work of the Council in the field of social policies.

We articulated our intervention around three key messages. First of all, we asked for a sort of reality check of the social situation on the ground. Then we acknowledged recent improvements in the identification of the right priorities to address the current socio-economic situation in the EU, but then questioned the real possibility to translate them into concrete policy measures that improve people’s lives across Europe, given what Finance Ministers picked up from it.

There is a tendency to overemphasise recent signs of economic recovery. Official data describes a situation of uneven improvements and persistent divergence among and within Member States. Besides some good signs in labour markets, negative trends remain with continued wage moderation, 122 million people still at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU in 2014 and broad and increasing inequality. This is confirmed by Social Platform members who know the situation on the ground and tell us that poverty, exclusion and precariousness are still a widespread reality after years of austerity and cuts to social protection systems and services.

Some positive signs came last November when the European Commission released the Annual Growth Survey (AGS) Package, which sets out general economic and social priorities for the EU and provides Member States with policy guidance for the following year. Despite overemphasising the activation role of social protection systems, these documents recognise that investing in people and in social policies brings long-term social and economic returns, and identify some important priorities for 2016: more permanent contracts and investment in healthcare, childcare, housing support and rehabilitation services above all.

Yet when the Ministers of Economy and Finance met last Friday to discuss these policy priorities, they concluded that business as usual is the right approach, narrowing down social investment to investments in human capital, denying the need to reduce precariousness through more permanent contracts and to fight poverty and social exclusion by ensuring adequate protection to all, and focusing again only on prudent budget planning and sustainability of social protection systems.

Representatives of some Member States agreed that there is a problem of coherence and that despite recent attempts by Ministers of Labour and Social Affairs to rebalance economic and social governance, these efforts are far from producing concrete results.

Others asked us to provide them with some concrete suggestions on the direction they should work and we insisted that adequacy of social benefits and services is key to ensure a life in dignity and full participation in society for all. Integrating a social dimension in economic policies, investigating the possibility to use budgetary flexibility for social investment as is the case for other public expenditures and contributing proactively to the development and implementation of the upcoming European pillar of social rights are a few examples we provided them with.

All in all, it was a good opportunity to engage with decision-makers and express our views, concerns, suggestions and support for their work. Doing it on a constant basis would allow NGOs to bring in their expertise and achieve concrete results for people in the EU. That is why at Social Platform we advocate for a structured civil dialogue.