Tamsin Rose, EPHA’s General Secretary, gave a presentation as part of a two days conference titled "Social Policy Agenda 2006-2010: What Future for European Social Policy?" organised by the Social Platform on 20-21 October 2004 in Brussels.
Speakers included ministers, members of the European Parliament, government officials, members of the Commission agencies, Commission officials and NGO representatives.
The first day of the conference, the Social Platform presented two main documents: "Paper on the Lisbon Strategy" and "Social Platform proposals for the Commission for the new Social Policy Agenda", the conference later on focused on the different issues addressed by these documents.
The various documents and the conference report are already available from the Social Platform’s website.
The documents will be sent to the European Commission, who will take them into account when drafting the new Social Policy Agenda (first proposal expected by the beginning of 2005) and when assessing the achievements of the Lisbon Strategy (for more information about this, EPHA members can read "The Lisbon Strategy - a brief introduction".
An NGO Social Policy Agenda within the Lisbon Strategy
The first session of the conference highlighted that the governments should work harder on implementation of the Lisbon Agenda.
An interesting remark was posed by a representative of DG Employment on health and safety in the workplace, which had not been mentioned in the Social Platform’s documents.
Doing EU Social Policy: Tools and Context
The second session focused on examples of the implementation of EU social policy at national level, the link between social protection and fundamental rights and the reinforcement of OMC.
Health and safety in the work place was addressed as a major problem to be solved in the new Member States.
Social Policy, Society and Individuals
The third session (see Tamsin’s presentation below) focused on the link of social policy and health status of citizens.
Agnes Parent-Thirion, from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions gave a very interesting presentation on social protection, employment and demographic change.
Mr Jerome Vignon, Health of Directorate Social Protection and Social Integration, DG Employment and Social Affairs, answered the questions from the audience, most of them on the Directive of Services of General Interest.
Equality and Anti-discrimination
Carlotta Besozzi, Director of the European Disability Forum (EDF) (an EPHA member) presented the proposals of the Social Platform on equality and anti-discrimination.
Social Policies for Social Inclusion
The debate of the last session included questions about the Directive on Services of General Interest, lifelong learning, more resources for citizen’s participation and comments on responsibility of MS to achieve the Lisbon goals.
Conclusions
This conference provided the opportunity for lively debates with a broad range of speakers at an early stage of discussions on the future Social Policy Agenda.
Many Commission speakers promised that they would take into account the documents presented.
The Social Platform’s proposals include:
Strengthen the open method of coordination (OMC). They suggest areas where institutional coordination within and between EU institutions needs to be ameliorated to improve policies, and propose areas where more needs to be done to develop indicators and research to support social policy.
Partnerships between different actors, including trade unions, would help strengthen efforts to include more vulnerable groups in society.
New legislation on gender equality outside of procurement is urgently needed to build on achievements up to now in the field of gender equality, and the future human rights agency must make the fight against discrimination on all grounds a high priority in its work.
A binding EU framework on social reporting would improve the contribution of business to sustainable development, and a Handbook on Social Procurement would help capitalise on the possibilities for social procurement under the EU procurement directives.
