The European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee (EMPL) is scheduled to vote on 2 September on its opinion on the Performance Framework Regulation, the law that will decide how the EU tracks and reports on its entire next budget, close to €2 trillion euros over seven years.
As the drafts stands, Roma communities appear in only four narrow indicators out of the hundreds in the whole framework. Antigypsyism is not named at all. If this remains unchanged, the EU could spend billions of euros and still have almost no way of knowing whether Roma communities benefited.
The Multiannual Financial Framework, or MFF, is the EU’s seven-year budget, made up of several programmes. ERGO Network is focused on four of them: the Performance Framework Regulation, the National and Regional Partnership Plans, the European Social Fund and AgoraEU. All four will be locked in together by year’s end.
Building on what we have learned
I’ve spent much of my career watching the distance between political commitments and what happens in practice. Before I became director of ERGO Network, I ran the Roma Office at the Czech government’s Council for Roma Minority Affairs.
In 2009, when the EU adopted its Ten Common Principles on Roma inclusion, I felt that something had genuinely shifted. What followed taught many of us across the Roma movement that commitments on paper are only the beginning.
Strategies were adopted across Europe, but too often without the resources, meaningful involvement of Roma communities or accountability needed to turn them into lasting change. Roma organisations and communities kept pushing for change, yet many of the inequalities those strategies were meant to address persist today.
We are not starting from scratch this time. ERGO Network and our members worked throughout the previous EU budget cycle, and we have learned where funding frameworks can enable change and where gaps in their design can leave Roma communities behind. We know what needs to be built into the rules from the start. There is no reason to repeat mistakes we already know how to avoid.
Four indicators are not enough
The Performance Framework Regulation sets indicators that EU-funded programme will report against. Exactly four intervention fields mention Roma by name, covering education, up-skilling, employment, and social inclusion.
That sounds like progress, until you see what they measure: participation not whether people’s situation changed or whether programmes reached those most affected. Antigypsyism, the EU-recognised form of racism targeting Roma people, is not mentioned once.
EMPL’s opinion, due 2 September, is one of several feeding into the file. The lead committees, Budgets and Budgetary Control, will vote on the full report later this autumn, followed by a vote of the whole Parliament, before Council negotiations begin. EMPL’s vote comes soonest.
ERGO Network has submitted detailed amendments to fix this, including to Annex I, the regulation’s full list of indicators. We are asking for the existing four Roma-related indicators to be upgraded. They should measure real change, rather than simply count participants.
We are asking for ethnicity and minority status to be added as a standard category more widely, alongside gender and age. And we are asking for antigypsyism to be named explicitly.
There is another problem with the Annex I. The regulation currently allows the Commission to narrow the list later through a delegated act, without a full vote. This should not be possible.
Aggregated ethnicity data
A common objection is that ethnicity data is too sensitive to collect. It isn’t new territory. The Fundamental Rights Agency already gathers this data through voluntary, anonymous self-identification, the same method used in several national censuses and recommended by the Council of Europe.
Nobody is required to disclose their ethnicity; what’s asked is that the resulting aggregate data gets used to evaluate whether a programme worked.
The Fundamental Rights Agency has already measured the gap it would otherwise hide. Seventy percent of Roma people across the EU live at risk of poverty, four times the general rate. Among Roma children, it’s closer to eight in ten.
Nearly half still attend schools where most classmates are Roma too, segregation that has barely shifted in years. At the midpoint of the EU’s own 2030 strategy, most Member States are off track to meet their own targets.
This vote is also taking place within a budget that looks very different from the one before it. The new MFF includes more than €130 billion for a new European Competitiveness Fund for defence, security and space. That is several times more than in the previous cycle.
At the same time, the European Social Fund is losing its standalone identity. MEP Estelle Ceulemans, who leads EMPL’s opinion on this file, has warned this would be “the first time since the Treaty of Rome” without a dedicated social funds line. Civil Society Europe called it a “renationalised budget which deprioritises social cohesion.”
ERGO Network is not raising these concerns alone. On 14 July, we joined 32 other European networks, representing over 2,800 organisations, urging the Council to reject a proposed cut to AgoraEU and instead raise its budget to €10.72 billion, in line with Parliament’s position. The EUFunds4Social Coalition makes a related case for a standalone European Social Fund.
Ahead of 2 September, MEPs and Council negotiators should make a number of changes. They should name antigypsyism explicitly and upgrade the four existing Roma indicators so that they measure real change. They should add ethnicity as a standard category more widely.
The framework should include indicators tracking involvement of Roma-led organisations’ in delivering programmes. It should also include indicators on antigypsyism training for officials.
Civil society should have real voting power on the committees overseeing the roughly €780 billion National and Regional Partnership Plan. And small, grassroot organisations need capacity-building so that they can take part as equals.
Within AgoraEU, we are asking for antigypsyism to be named among the forms of racism it already fights, since right now it is the one left unnamed.
Member States have their own part to play, separate from Brussels. National governments can instruct their own Council negotiators to support these amendments. They can task their statistical offices with enabling voluntary ethnic self-identification in EU-funded programme reporting, in line with GDPR and Council of Europe standards.
And they can involve Roma-led organisations directly, now, in shaping how these funds get implemented nationally. This needs to happen before the design choices have already been made
Keeping commitments in the law
We are not asking the EU to promise something new. Everything here is something it has already committed to, in its own Roma Strategic Framework and its own plan against racism. We are asking it to keep those commitments in the text of the law, before the vote.
We have seen this story before: commitments made, strategies adopted, and the details that decide whether they reach Roma communities settled somewhere else.
The difference this time is that we know where to look. On 2 September, we need Europe’s decision-makers to look there too.
