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European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] 24th Recovery and Resilience Dialogue introductory remarks by Commissioner Dombrovskis Strasbourg, 19 October 2026 Honourable co-chairs, Honourable Members, I am pleased to return to this House for our 24 th Dialogue. We have come a long way in implementing the RRF, with EUR 451 billion already disbursed to Member States and nearly 70% of milestones and targets al...
European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] 24th Recovery and Resilience Dialogue introductory remarks by Commissioner Dombrovskis Strasbourg, 19 October 2026 Honourable co-chairs, Honourable Members, I am pleased to return to this House for our 24 th Dialogue. We have come a long way in implementing the RRF, with EUR 451 billion already disbursed to Member States and nearly 70% of milestones and targets already positively assessed. A final effort is now required to bring the RRF to a successful conclusion. The impact of the RRF has been very significant. By the end of 2025, 95% of the RRF grants disbursed to Member States had been spent. Public investment in the EU rose to 3.9% of GDP in 2025, up from 3.2% in 2019, with the RRF playing a major role in this increase. This stands in sharp contrast to the prolonged decline in public investment following the global financial crisis. We expect NextGenerationEU to have raised EU real GDP by 1.4% in 2026 compared to a scenario without the RRF. This is a conservative estimate, since it does not yet take the impact of RRF reforms into account. In addition, cross-border spillover effects are estimated to generate almost EUR 140 billion in economic impact within the EU. In highly integrated economies [such as Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria and Denmark] the impact of the RRF is double the size of their national plans. Other important impacts include a reduction of CO 2 emissions by around 54 million tonnes each year and a 1.5 multiplier for every euro spent on digital investments. We will continue to analyse these impacts. All Member States have submitted their final payment requests on time, by the 30 September deadline. We have already examined more than half of the outstanding milestones and targets. And we will assess the remaining before the end of the year. While this represents a large volume of work in a short period, the Commission has prepared well, and I can report that the assessments are on broadly track. Denmark was the first Member State to complete its recovery and resilience plan and receive its last payment, and Sweden also received its final payment last week. We expect France and Austria will join Denmark and Sweden at the end of this month. Overall, we expect to disburse most of the amounts committed to Member States, but some reductions are also likely to arise from unmet milestones or targets. Given the scale of the RRF, it is natural that it has been subject to close scrutiny and high expectations in terms of accountability. The Commission has applied the requirements of the RRF Regulation diligently and published its assessments scrutinising milestones and targets. The European Court of Auditors' recently published annual report reviewed about half of the milestones and targets on the basis of which the Commission made payments in 2025. For 96% of milestones and targets, the Commission and the ECA are in full agreement. In fact, our views differ on just 16 of them. For 6 of these findings, the ECA applies different concepts of ‘double funding' and ‘eligibility start date' than the Commission, and Member States. The remaining 10 arise from case-specific differences in the reading of milestones and targets. The Commission's replies explain those differences in views. I would add that, when it comes to audits and controls, the scrutiny will not end on 31 December. Member States must continue to ensure effective and efficient controls and carry out audit work into 2027. And the Commission will continue its own controls and audits to ensure Member States comply with their obligations. OLAF, the EPPO and the ECA will also continue to exercise their respective powers of control, investigation and audit. Honourable Members, to conclude: The Commission now has about one month to finalise the assessment of all final payment requests to meet the deadline for ordinary disbursements set on 31 December. Building on our extensive preparatory work, we will continue to apply our rigorous methodology to close the Facility in a thorough, transparent and successful manner. SPEECH/26/2196 <@rel_link@>
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