EPSCO COUNCIL : CONCLUSIONS ON SSGI: 'FIRST STEP IN RIGHT DIRECTION'.

• Position: Social services of general interest

At the close of the Employment and Social Policy Council, on 6 December 2010, the Belgian Presidency welcomed the adoption of conclusions on social services of general interest (SSGIs) - even if they did not prove to be very ambitious in the end - as well as the "voluntary quality framework" proposed by the Social Protection Committee (SPC). "This is a first step in the right direction," declared the Belgian Secretary of State, Jean-Marc Delizee. "The SPC's voluntary framework deserves credit for setting boundaries," he considered.

The disappointment of the Belgian Presidency is, however, palpable. It was the latter which, at the end of October, organised the Third Forum on SSGIs in the hope of achieving a specific approach in favour of these services or, at least, favourable treatment in the interpretation of competition rules.

Faced with the reluctance of some member states and the Commission, its transcript was largely revised downward: the fifteen recommendations of the forum were largely relaxed under pressure from the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands. The conclusions suffered the same fate and the Social Protection Committee's quality framework settled for being voluntary.

The adopted conclusions, entitled Social services of general interest: At the heart of the European social model', are not very ambitious. Even the title was the subject of a footnote recalling the national specificities of SSGIs, upon the request of Malta. At the same time, the Presidency's idea to set up a standing dialogue group on SSGIs has quite simply disappeared, all responsibilities lying with the Social Protection Committee, in charge of maintaining regular contact with the various stakeholders, in particular for the organisation of the next SSGI forum.

Broadly speaking, these conclusions settle for inviting the Commission to provide more specific information on the application of EU regulations to SSGIs and to carry out an assessment of this application, in order to improve legal certainty. More specifically, the Commission must set out to define whether or not a social service is a general interest service of an economic nature, according to the notion of certain cross-border interest' in the framework of the application of public procurement rules to SSGI and according to the concept of affecting trade between member states in the field of the application of state aid rules with regard to SSGIs of an economic nature.

As for member states, they...