Hans-Joachim Reck, President of CEEP, presented this key message at the Tripartite Social Summit today in Brussels. The proposal for a “Compact for Growth in Public Services” had been launched ahead of the June European Council meeting and the CEEP President took the opportunity to review two of the ingredients of this Compact.

With regard to investments in infrastructures, Mr Reck stated that “CEEP welcomes the decision to launch the Project Bond pilot phase and call on decision makers to ensure that the remaining funds still to be mobilised are allocated by the first semester of 2013.” He clearly emphasised that this is not about “asking money for public services”, it is about investing in the future. In this respect, the CEEP President gave a concrete example from the Joint Declaration of the Public Services Employers Forum presented by CEEP at the Summit:

“Each Euro publically invested in rail infrastructure brings an added value of two Euros for national economies.” With respect to concrete projects CEEP argues for an integrated approach for investments in infrastructure. For the energy sector this would for example mean that transmission and distribution networks need to be considered as one unit in terms of security of supply, competitiveness and sustainability and therefore need to be expanded in parallel.

CEEP President also highlighted the importance of investing in the jobs of the future. “The Employment package clearly emphasises that the biggest employment growth potential is in public services, notably in green and white jobs.” Mr Reck continued: “But when it comes to putting in place concrete actions to favour this job creation, implementation is lagging behind.” He then reiterated CEEP’s call for a reprogramming of Structural Funds in support of the creation of green and white jobs.

Following the celebrations of the 20th Anniversary of the European Single Market, Mr Reck concluded that public services' employers believe that the Single Market is a unique achievement. However, the stocktaking of the last 20 years should mainly be used to better plan the future. He then referred to the twelve actions set in the Single Market Act II, stating that they should be preceded by an adequate impact assessment in order to avoid repeating mistakes from the past.

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For further information, please contact:

Priya Klinkenberg- tel. +32 (0) 2 219 27 98

CEEP gathers enterprises and organisations from across Europe, both public and private, at national, regional and local level, which are public employers or providers of services of general interest. CEEP members contribute to more than 26% of EU GDP and employ 30% of the EU workforce; CEEP is one of the three general corss-industry European Social Partners.