“bush”, “complex”, costly, uncoordinated, not always effective… The 100 billion euro recovery plan launched to boost the economy following the first wave of Covid-19, in the fall of 2020, takes its place. On Wednesday March 9, before the Senate Finance Committee, Pierre Moscovici, President of the Court of Auditors, pinpointed the heterogeneous content of “France Relance”, its sometimes erratic management and its effectiveness yet to be demonstrated.
“The border with other plans or programs in progress is not always well demarcated and is even sometimes confused”estimated the former minister of the economy by presenting the investigation of the Court, carried out at the request of Claude Raynal, the president (Socialist Party) of the commission. “This complexity is found in the management of the recovery plan, entrusted to a large number of actors”underlined Mr. Moscovici, deploring a “fairly heavy administrative machinery”.
As for the speed of execution of the plan, supposed to ensure its effectiveness, “it may have had as a counterpart a lower requirement in the selection of the projects retained”. Thus Ma PrimeRénov’, for the thermal renovation of housing, considered by the executive to be one of the main successes of the plan, and whose envelope has been doubled to reach 4 billion euros: the system is not quite targeted and its effectiveness “is not guaranteed”, according to the Court.
“A certain vigilance”
The same weakness for the monitoring of allocated sums, which causes “a gray area difficult to grasp”, between the disbursement of the State towards the operators, and the moment when the final beneficiaries receive the public money. The Court also noted “the high cost of communication around the recovery plan”. The government’s information service has allocated 17 million euros to this, “to which were added more sectoral communication actions carried out by ministries and operators for several million euros”.
Finally, in a context of skyrocketing inflation and tight supplies, Mr Moscovici called “to a certain vigilance in the pursuit of the implementation of the recovery plan, to prevent it from contributing to accentuate them”. The Court recommends no more opening of new appropriations under the plan beyond the end of 2022, “and to provide for its deletion as soon as possible following this date”.
At the end of 2021, 72 of the 100 billion euros had been committed and 42 billion actually disbursed. Disbursements might be spread out until 2026, or even 2028, according to the Court. These reviews “join the analysis that we had already madesays Mr. Raynal. At a time when the crisis in Ukraine is going to bring new needs, it is all the more important to get out of this plan, because if we put everything in bulk, without separate budgetary missions, we will no longer have any possibility of control effective. »