Committee on Employment and Social Affairs Ordinary meeting ICM
1 October 2026
Contents updated on 1 Oct 2026
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EMPL European Parliament
Follow its sittings03:32 - 03:34
Speaker 1
Okay, dear colleagues, can I please ask you to take your seats?
03:34 - 07:41
Speaker 2
We are about to start. So, dear colleagues, members of national parliaments and esteemed guests, welcome to our interparliamentary committee meeting. As chair of the Employment and Social Affairs Committee, it is my privilege to open our joint discussion on the future architecture and priorities of the European Social Fund for the 2028-2034 period. Under our current framework, the ESF+ stands as the European Union's main funding instrument for employment and social policies, backed directly by 95.1 billion from the EU budget. It also plays a central role in turning the principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights into tangible action and driving progress towards our common headline targets.
Across Member States, this funding has delivered proven results, helping millions of citizens gain new qualifications, re-enter the labour market, or access essential social inclusion services.
Yet, as we look across the European Union, progress towards these 2030 social targets remains deeply uneven. Even as employment figures improve, severe deficits persist in job quality and social inclusion, leaving one in 12 European workers at risk of poverty. Adult participation in training continues to lag far behind our common European goals, while our collective efforts fall well short of our target to lift 15 million people out of poverty by 2030. These ongoing struggles are made even harder by a severe cost-of-living crisis, especially rising housing expenses, alongside rapid developments in artificial intelligence and shifting demographics. Looking ahead to the proposed 2028-2034 framework, under national and regional partnership plans, the European Commission suggests replacing dedicated fund budget lines and specific thematic earmarks with a broad 14% social spending requirement.
But when we examine the financial reality, this spending floor translates into a substantial funding reduction compared to current allocations, while the Commission's overall figures lean heavily on loans that carry real debt obligations. Furthermore, as the European Court of Auditors has cautioned, tracking social spending through broad predefined coefficients creates a genuine risk of overestimating real impact and losing transparency. Faced with these proposed changes, the position of the European Parliament is clear and firm. We need a strong, visible, and standalone ESF. In our plenary interim reports, Parliament called for an increased standalone allocation of 124.19 billion, and furthermore, in our EMPL draft report, we have fought to safeguard dedicated social funding by proposing binding thematic targets: 30% for social inclusion, 15% for the Youth Guarantee, 5% for the Child Guarantee, 5% for material deprivation, and 5% for homelessness.
Today's meeting brings together European and national parliamentarians at a vital moment to ensure our future social fund truly delivers on quality jobs, skills, and poverty reduction. Thank you all for being here, and I look forward to an open and also fruitful debate. We will start by introductory remarks from Mr. Stefan Olsson, Deputy Director-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion.
Please, Mr. Olsson, the floor is yours for the next 10 minutes.
07:41 - 09:44
Speaker 3
Thank you very much, honorable chair, honorable members of the European and national parliaments. I'm very proud to be here representing the Commission. This is this interparliamentary committee is a very very important part of the democratic process, and so thank you very much for for having the Commission here. My task today, I think, is to to give you the broad strokes of the of the proposal that the Commission has done, and and I'm very happy to do so to follow up from from the chair's remarks. The it's important, I think, to start to see that this is quite a complex animal, the the budget proposal.
We have some really complementary and and quite complex parts that that all go together. We have rules on on process, on audits.
We have we have of course the overall issue of the size of the budget, which is what we see in the media because it's I think the easiest and and also a very important factor. But what we need to remember and what I what I know this this committee and is is looking at is of course how we all can best support the European citizens through this budget. And and here the ESF and and the overall budget, the MFF has a a key role to play in strong collaboration and complementarity with national, regional and and other budget sources. So looking then at the ESF, that's of course the oldest of our cohesion funds. It will soon celebrate its 70th birthday.
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