Recovery fund: Council adopted update to Germany’s national plan

The Council today adopted an amending implementing decision as regards the recovery and resilience plan of Germany.

The update to Germany’s plan is of a technical nature. It concerns two measures in Germany’s plan, one related to the digitalisation of rail, and the other to research and development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2:

• As regards the digitalisation of rail, one of seven German projects had to postpone its completion date due to exceptional delays in construction.
• As regards R&D for vaccines, due to several factors of uncertainty inherent in research and development one of the German programmes had to amend its precise targets.

The very limited modification put forward by Germany does not affect the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and coherence of the German recovery and resilience plan.

During 2023, it is expected that gradually each of the 27 member states will request implementing decisions concerning updates to their national recovery and resilience plans at least once, in order to access the new REPowerEU grants, or to request available loans, or to take into account the updated RRF allocation.

Background

The Recovery and Resilience Facility is the EU’s programme of large-scale financial support in response to the challenges the pandemic has posed to the European economy. The facility’s €724 billion (in current prices) are used to support the reforms and investments outlined in the member states’ recovery and resilience plans.

Germany had been among the very first member states whose national recovery and resilience plan was greenlighted (on 13 July 2021).

The Recovery and Resilience Facility’s maximum financial contribution for non-repayable financial support of each member state was updated on 30 June 2022. On 9 December 2022, Germany submitted an updated national plan to the Commission, in order to take into account changes in two measures which are due to objective circumstances.