Years later, we are all still experiencing the consequences of the COVID‑19 pandemic, as EU countries recover from the severe economic downturn that followed the 2020 outbreak. The EU Recovery Instrument – Next Generation EU (NGEU) was specifically created to help Member States address these challenges. It has a strong focus on the twin green and digital transitions – key priorities backed by the European Parliament and a total budget for recovery initiatives of €806.9 billion, financed through EU borrowing on the markets, which has to be paid out by the end of 2026.
While the Council established the NGEU, Parliament co-legislated the rules for its implementation, adopting the regulation on the NGEU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in February 2021. The RRF distributes 90 % of the NGEU allocation to the Member States, financing reforms and investments specified in their national recovery and resilience plans (NRRPs). Parliament wanted to ensure the RRF is managed transparently, that it stimulates progress in the green, digital and energy sectors, supports children, young people and women, and that respect for the rule of law is among the key prerequisites for receiving funding.
The European Commission has to update Parliament on RRF implementation progress, and present annual, mid-term and ex-post reports. To ensure it receives timely and detailed information, and to enable an exchange of views with other institutions, Parliament insisted on a bi-monthly meeting between Members of its Committees on Economic and Monetary Affairs and on Budgets and the European Commission representatives in charge. In addition, Parliament set up a special standing working group for RRF scrutiny, to discuss the quality of NRRP measures and progress on their implementation.
Parliament has also adopted a number of resolutions on these topics. Members have called, for example, for a thorough assessment of the plans and payment requests, stressed the importance of sound execution of the RRF objectives, and demanded that respect for the rule of law be a pre-condition for disbursements.
Since 2022, Members have looked very closely at RRF expenditure through the annual budgetary discharge procedure. RRF-related issues are prominent in the work of Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT), and were included in a dedicated chapter of the decision granting budget discharge to the European Commission. This procedure applies only to RRF grants, however; the loans are beyond Parliament’s scrutiny. Implementation of the RRF entered a decisive stage in 2024, as the 2026 deadline for payment execution approaches. To closely monitor NGEU allocation Parliament, thus used both its powers over the budget and on oversight and scrutiny. Parliament’s powers fall broadly into six, often overlapping, domains: law-making, the budget, scrutiny of the executive, external relations, and, to a lesser extent, constitutional affairs and agenda-setting. This graphic shows more examples of areas where Parliament used one or more of its different powers to influence legislation:
For a fuller picture of the European Parliament’s activity over the past five years, take a look at our publication Examples of Parliament’s impact: 2019 to 2024: Illustrating the powers of the European Parliament, from which this case is drawn.
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