NextGenerationEU: Germany submits request to amend recovery and resilience plan

Germany submitted on Friday a request to amend its recovery and resilience plan to the Commission. The request concerns a limited set of targets. Under the Recovery and Resilience Facility Regulation, a Member State can request a revision of its plan in limited and well-defined cases, including where objective circumstances render particular milestones or targets no longer achievable. The Commission’s guidance to Member States of May 2022 further details when and how Member States can request such revisions.

Germany has requested to amend two measures of its recovery and resilience plan. The first one is a measure supporting investments in the digitalisation of rail. Germany has requested to postpone the expected completion date of one of seven projects due to exceptional delays in construction. The second measure is a special programme to accelerate research and development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. For this measure, Germany has submitted an amendment to take into account the fact that one out of three participants under the programme was successful in both research and roll-out of the vaccine, whereas the two other participants did not submit a request for approval to the European Medicines Agency, leading to a lower total outflow of funds under the programme.

As set out in the Recovery and Resilience Facility Regulation, the Commission will now assess the objective circumstances and amendments put forward by Germany, and whether the amended plan still fulfils the 11 assessment criteria in the Regulation.

If the Commission’s assessment is positive, it will make a proposal for an amendment to the Council implementing decision to reflect the changes to the German plan, ordinarily within two months from the date of the request’s submission.

Germany’s plan benefits from a grant allocation of €28 billion. Germany received €2.25 billion in pre-financing in August 2021.