The European Court of Auditors has recently published a special report entitled “Have the Marco Polo programmes been effective in shifting traffic off the road?” The purpose of the audit was to assess whether the funded projects were effective, and, particularly, to assess whether the European Commission had planned, managed and supervised the projects in order to maximise their effectiveness. The Court concluded that the Marco Polo programmes were not effective. This report, as previous ECA’s reports, shows that EU funds are not effective in helping to achieve EU policies objectives and reveals that EU taxpayers’ money is not being properly spent. In fact, this is another ECA’s report that shows the EU budget wastes millions of taxpayer’s money.
The Marco Polo I and II programmes are part of the EU transport policy objective to develop alternatives to road-only freight transport. The main aim is to reduce international road freight traffic, and, consequently, improve the environmental performance of freight transport whilst reducing congestion and increasing road safety.
The Court noted that “Since 2003, the Marco Polo I and II programmes have financed transport service projects designed to shift freight transport from road to rail, inland waterways and short sea shipping.” However, the Court found that the programmes were not effective and did not meet the EU's policy targets. In fact, according to the Court “little impact was achieved in shifting freight off the roads.”
Moreover, the Court could not find reliable data to assess the programmes' beneficial impact on the environmental performance of freight transport, on road congestion and on road safety.
Ville Itälä, the ECA member responsible for the report, said “To put it simply, the programmes were ineffective as they did not meet the targets, little impact was achieved in shifting freight off the roads and there were no data to assess the achievement of the policy objectives (e.g. environmental benefits)".
The ECA also found that the “programmes were not well designed for businesses” and noted that implementation difficulties has made beneficiaries not taking advantage of the scheme. Consequently, “there were not enough relevant project proposals put forward.” According to ECA, “This provided poor project results and poor sustainability of the funded transport services.”
Furthermore, the Court found that the majority of the projects audited would have started even without EU funding.
The EU Court of Auditors also criticised the European Commission as it has not carried out “a fundamental assessment of the programmes’ market potential to achieve the policy objectives” and for not taking “timely corrective action to remedy the apparent flaws in programme design.”
Hence, stressing the programmes' weaknesses, namely “insufficient market uptake, absence of evidence of achieving the objectives, high administrative burden, poor sustainability and deadweight”, the Court recommended “the Council, the European Parliament and the Commission to consider discontinuing EU funding for transport freight services following the same design as the Marco Polo programmes”.
