Unlocking the Social Scoreboard’s potential to create an inclusive, sustainable Europe
At the beginning of May 2021, Social Platform published and disseminated an open letter calling for an ambitious and comprehensive revision of the Social Scoreboard.
The European Pillar of Social Rights (Social Pillar) is accompanied by the so-called ‘Social Scoreboard’, a scoreboard of key statistical indicators to screen the employment and social performance of Member States. It serves as a reference framework to monitor progress made in these areas and aims at detecting the most significant employment and social challenges.
In the context of the Social Pillar Action Plan, published in March 2021, the European Commission announced a revision of the Social Scoreboard by adding several headline and secondary indicators (see Annex II of the Action Plan).
Ahead of the finalisation of this revision, which the European Commission aims to achieve at the June meeting of the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council configuration (EPSCO), Social Platform called on the European Commission, Eurostat, and the Indicator Sub-Group of the Social Protection Committee (SPC), to revise the Social Scoreboard in such a way that it creates real and lasting positive changes to the lives and wellbeing of people in Europe.
In our view, it must contain additional headline and secondary indicators to those proposed in the Action Plan to ensure that they extensively cover all 20 Social Pillar principles, which is currently not the case. It must also better breakdown data by various factors, such as gender, age, ethnicity, socio-economic status, aiming at measuring the impact of policies on various groups, particularly those in vulnerable situations. Only then can persisting and complex barriers and reforms needed for improving the living and working conditions for these groups be identified and translated into adequate policy responses.
