News

Europe needs to stop pushing people to the margins and bring the social debate back to the centre. This was the clear message our President, Heather Roy, voiced last week at the Conference on the Social Investment Package (SIP), organised by the European Commission together with the Irish EU Presidency.

The SIP could offer the opportunity to make a paradigm shift from seeing social policies as a cost to acknowledging these as an investment. For this to be the case, social investment has to be understood as the provision and use of finance to generate both social and economic returns, aimed at addressing emerging social risks and unmet needs for the well-being of people and socially cohesive societies. Next to this, a rights based approach is a precondition for social investment to work.

Different speakers at the Conference voiced their belief in the SIP as the tool to ensure that people are Europe’s biggest asset and that only by investing more and better in women and men, from birth to old age, will Europe get out of the crisis, and ensure credibility and legitimacy. Irish Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, made a clear statement that the overwhelming adherence of the last years to austerity measure, has put the social model underpinning EU on pause. EC Director General Koos Richelle from his side pointed out how the EU is dramatically non performing on the Europe 2020 poverty target. That is why he called for, as a principle, the social discourse to be taken up in the debates on macro-economic imbalances, referring also to the current debates on the social dimension of the Economic and Monetary Union.

Commissioner Andor restated at the Conference his full commitment to social investment declaring that preventing poverty and improving lives from the start is better than repairing damage later. He pointed out the vital role governments have to play in implementing social investment and how partnership with social partners and civil society is important to ensure policy reforms are also based on experiences from the ground. Referring to the debates on the social dimension of the Economic and Monetary Union, the Commission is currently developing a social scoreboard. It will help detecting social imbalances at the earliest stage and should be included in macro-economic monitoring mechanisms.

No matter how great the Social Investment Package could be as a document, all will now depend on how it will be taken up and implemented by decision makers. After the Conference, one of our concerns is however still whether policy makers outside the social field – being clearly absent from the event – will take a real turn in their position on what is best for Europe. Will they ensure social investment to be implemented across different policies and commit to social investment for the well-being of all people? As social NGOs, we sincerely keep hoping they will do so.

You can read our full position on the SIP here.

You can read the Commission’s conclusions of the conference here.

2013-05-02