Photo ©️ Federal Chancellery of Austria

High-Level Conference of European Ministers
responsible for Family Affairs

On the initiative of Minister Suzanne Raab, Austrian Minister for Women, Family, Integration and Media , a high level conference of European Ministers responsible for Family Affairs took place in Vienna on 13th June 2024, as part of the commemoration of the 30 anniversary of the International Year of the Family.

The conference “Importance of families in society” focused on the central role families and family policies hold in EU member states and acknowledged that families should receive the best possible financial and institutional support.

It was a great honour for COFACE Families Europe President, Annemie Drieskens, to participate in this conference and raise the voice of families, highlight the challenges families of today are facing across Europe and present the work COFACE delivers in close cooperation with his members.

In her keynote Annemie Drieskens highlighted also the ambition of the recently launched “European Observatory on Family Policy” to promote strong family policies which support the wide diversity of families and fulfill successfully their needs. It is clear from the first report of the Observatory that moving “Towards greater Family policy integration” is crucial and requires a joint effort of local, national, European governmental organisations.

The high level conference was also an important opportunity to take the Ministers on a journey and present “The State of the European Union for families”, COFACE’s assessment of the European Union’s work over the last 5 years. Important steps have been taken by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to improve family wellbeing and it is clear that those initiatives must be sustained and be implemented. Even by doing so the situation of families remains critical. All families are in the same storm but they are not in the same boat. More needs to be done to ensure that policy systems help families to face the risks and be resilient.

The Ministers were invited to be the ambassadors for families and to join forces to “Act Now” on the key challenges families are facing and what COFACE Families Europe believes the European and national policy makers should concentrate on.

After rich discussions, exchanges of experiences and good practices between member states the Ministers expressed their commitment for families in a joint declaration:

“The importance of families in society.
A European agenda for family wellbeing.Priorities and Solutions.
Declaration on creating the best possible conditions to enable and promote family life.”

The Ministers also expressed their willingness to join Minister Suzanne Raab in her ambition to have regular meetings and aim for the establishment of a European Council of Ministers responsible for Family Matters.

Read the full declaration here.

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Joint statement of the EEG-DI. Brussels, 2 May 2024

Call for stronger prevention of child institutionalisation:

Time to step up monitoring and evaluation of early childhood intervention and family support in the European Child Guarantee

The European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care (EEG) welcomes the initiative of the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union to host the knowledge-sharing Conference “European Child Guarantee: from engagement to reality” on 2 and 3 May 2024. The EEG welcomes that many National Action Plans (NAPs) include measures in the area of deinstitutionalisation (DI) for children but calls for increased emphasis on prevention and early intervention, including Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) and support to parents and carers, to be monitored at national and EU level and addressed in the updated versions of NAPs.

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Enacted in June 2021, the European Child Guarantee represents a crucial step towards combating social exclusion by facilitating access to essential services and has catalysed momentum for the deinstitutionalisation of children. It identified children with disabilities and children living in alternative care among its target groups and invited Member States to enhance social protection, prevent children from being placed in institutional care, and ensure their transition to quality community-based and family-based care. Importantly, it also encouraged them to facilitate the early identification of developmental issues and health needs, and to provide habilitation and rehabilitation services for children with disabilities.

Overall, the Child Guarantee tackles many drivers of child institutionalisation, including poverty and lack of access to services, especially for children with disabilities. This is in line with the commitment of the EU to ensure the transition from institutional to family and community based care in its most important policies^[1] and funding regulations.^[2] These also include the 2024 Commission Recommendation on developing and strengthening integrated child protection systems in the best interests of the child,^[3] encouraging investment in non-residential services, including accessible housing for children with disabilities, and calling for the promotion of national deinstitutionalisation strategies for deinstitutionalisation, ensuring adequate support for foster families and comprehensive support programmes for young people with care experience.

Importantly, as a party to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the European Union is required to ensure full enjoyment of all rights by children with disabilities “on an equal basis with other children.” This includes deinstitutionalisation, including the requirement not to invest any public or private funding into institutions for children.

This role of the Child Guarantee in implementing deinstitutionalisation has also been reiterated in The European Parliament’s Resolution Children first – strengthening the Child Guarantee, two years on from its adoption (2023/2811(RPS)) stressing the need for ‘’Time-bound targets for bringing children out of institutions and into family and community settings’’. Further, it adheres to the European Parliament’s Report ‘’Reducing inequalities and promoting social inclusion in times of crisis for children and their families’ (2023/2066(INI)), highlighting that “child protection measures, including deinstitutionalisation, are also essential for children to achieve their rights and reach their full potential’’, and recommending that ‘’Member States develop proactive social policies to tackle the root causes of child institutionalisation, ensuring that it is not because of poverty and exclusion that children are institutionalised’’.

Nevertheless, almost three years after its adoption, across Europe hundreds of thousands of children still live in institutions, isolated from their families, their peers and local communities. An institution is any residential care facility where residents are isolated from the broader community, do not have enough control over their lives or decisions affecting them, and which is characterised by features such as depersonalisation, lack of individualised support, or limited contact with birth families or caregivers. “Family-like” institutions, including large or small group homes, also fall within the definition of an institution and should not be considered as a substitute for a child’s right to grow up with a family.^[4]

Growing up in an institution can severely damage children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development as well as autonomy. Children do not learn basic life skills or how to manage their own lives while they are kept in institutions, and are thus unprepared for life in the outside world.^[5] Child institutionalisation has devastating consequences not only on the affected children and their families, but on society as a whole, by exacerbating stigma and social isolation, and feeding the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage.

Deinstitutionalisation requires a structural transformation of the social-care and child-protection systems. This includes preventative measures addressing children and families, to avoid children being placed in institutions in the first place, through access to mainstream services, healthcare, education, and welfare systems, as well as parents’ financial support, and programmes to foster kinship and foster care.^[6] It further requires that children, including children with disabilities, are involved in decisions made about them and that their opinions are given due weight in accordance with their age and maturity.^[7]

The EEG welcomes that several countries included measures to support children in alternative care and/or advance reforms linked to deinstitutionalisation in their National Action Plans (NAPs).^[8] However, we noticed that in some cases, these measures are limited and not part of a comprehensive framework, are not accompanied by the right type of support for local authorities to put them in place, and their implementation can be rather slow.^[9]

Prevention and early intervention should lead the development of alternative care programmes for all children, which should always be implemented with the best interest of the child as their guiding principle. For children with disabilities, overrepresented in institutions, family-centred Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) services are key in preventing institutionalisation as they empower children and families, and foster inclusion in education. ECI services provide individualised and intensive support to families with infants and young children with or at risk of experiencing developmental delays, or disabilities and support primary caregivers to improve their interactions with the child and build their capacities.^[10]

The EEG regrets that actions towards the strengthening of Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) systems and support to family and carers are present only in a minority of countries, and mainly focusing on the early identification of developmental delays and disabilities, rather than in the provision of support to families and children.^[11] It is clear that policies tackling the barriers for children with disabilities can only be efficient if accompanied by social protection and financial support to their families and carers, however, such measures are rarely found in the NAPs.^[12]

Gathering evidence and monitoring progress are crucial components of child rights policies. We thus embrace the adoption of the European Monitoring and Evaluation Framework in December 2023, that will guide the biennial reporting by Member States. It is a great achievement that one of the six main indicators focuses on the number of children in alternative care, broken down by care type; and share of children in residential care. This is a key milestone to monitor the progress on deinstitutionalisation and to provide comparative data for the EU, which should be complemented by national indicators and data collection efforts to improve the understanding of the demographics and needs of children in alternative care.

The EEG calls on Member States to:

1. Place measures towards deinstitutionalisation at the heart of their NAPs  starting from prevention,  through the development of community-based and family-based services, including systems of family-centred Early Childhood Intervention, financial support to families, and of foster care programmes.
2. Put the necessary measures in place to ensure that social welfare, social protection, and social services prioritise the strengthening of families and communities, taking proactive measures to prevent unnecessary separation of children from their families.
3. Advocate for the social and human rights model of disability, focusing on dismantling barriers faced by children or caregivers with disabilities when accessing services, and ensuring that children with disabilities receive adequate support within their family environments and to ensure they can access their right to inclusive education.
4. Support safe family reunification and transition to independent living based on individual needs and circumstances. Provide ongoing support for families and care leavers to facilitate their full inclusion into the community, as well as for young people with personal experience of care. This includes access to personal assistance for children and young people with disabilities in need of such support.
5. Ensure meaningful participation of children, caregivers, parents, persons with disabilities, and civil society organisations, including organisations of persons with disabilities, in the implementation, revision and monitoring of the NAPs.
6. Address and combat stigma and discrimination within the system, including challenging ableism, gender norms and discriminatory social attitudes towards marginalised communities that could lead to child institutionalisation.
7. Implement a systematic approach to disaggregating data across all sectors, including housing, parental or child disabilities, living arrangements, and social protection programmes. This approach should enable regular assessments of progress in transitioning to community-based support services.
8. Align national monitoring and evaluation frameworks, including the indicators, with the EU Monitoring and Evaluation framework on children in alternative care. Improve data collection of children and families at risk, on the one hand, and of the available services, on the other hand.

The EU holds significant sway over national policy development, which can be achieved by:

1. Fostering exchange between Member States on effective measures in the area of deinstitutionalisation for children and developing a study on EU-level effective deinstitutionalisation and ECI policies and practices.
2. Formulating EU Guidelines on DI for children including prevention, and guidance on how to establish and improve national Early Childhood Intervention services and systems.
3. Increasing the use of EU financial tools for DI for children and measures to tackle the drivers of child institutionalisation, through prevention and early intervention programmes with the child’s best interest at heart, including ECI system development and better coordination with general measures targeting families such as access to income, quality ECEC services and work-life balance, and piloting personal assistance for children and young people with disabilities.
4. Ensuring effective implementation of the UN CRPD at EU level, including through improved intersectional and intersectoral coordination at the European, regional, national and local levels, and with full participation of persons with disabilities and their representative organisations.
5. Implementing the measures linked to deinstitutionalisation included in the  2024 Commission Recommendation on developing and strengthening integrated child protection systems in the best interests of the child.

We hope that this Presidency event will be used as an opportunity for Member States to plan coordinated efforts towards the inclusion of all children and ensure that children receive care in a family and community-based environment.

For further information: https://deinstitutionalisation.com/

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^[1] The recent guarantees towards child protection enshrined in EU policy frameworks and initiatives include the Strategy on the Rights of the Child (2021), The Strategy on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2021-2030), the European Child Guarantee (2021) and the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy (2020-2024).

^[2] These EU Funding instruments include the Common Provisions Regulation (2021), the European Regional Development Fund and Cohesion Fund (ERDF/CF), the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) Regulation (2021) The Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (2021-2017) and the third Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (2021-2027).

^[3] Commission Recommendation of 23.4.2024 on developing and strengthening integrated child protection systems in the best interests of the child

^[4] General comment No. 5 (2017) on living independently and being included in the community, CRPD/C/GC/5, paragraph 16(c)

^[5] Opening Doors for Europe’s Children, (2017). Deinstitutionalisation of Europe’s Children, Question and answers https://www.eurochild.org/uploads/2021/02/Opening-Doors-QA.pdf

^[6] European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care (2022), EU Guidance on Independent living and inclusion in the community https://deinstitutionalisation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/eu-guidance-on-independent-living-and-inclusion-in-the-community-2-1.pdf

^[7] UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 7 (Children with disabilities)

^[8] These measures were included  for 16 NAPs – BE, BG, HR, CY, CZ, FI, FR, EL, IT, LX, MT, PL, PT, RO, ES, and SE in March 2023. Children in alternative care in the Child Guarantee National Action Plans. A summative analysis, (2023) United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Eurochild https://eurochild.org/uploads/2023/05/Children-in-alternative-care-in-the-Child-Guarantee-NAPs_DataCare-analysis.pdf

^[9] Children in alternative care in the Child Guarantee National Action Plans. A summative analysis, (2023) United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Eurochild https://eurochild.org/uploads/2023/05/Children-in-alternative-care-in-the-Child-Guarantee-NAPs_DataCare-analysis.pdf

^[10] EASPD (2022). Family-centred Early Childhood Intervention:The best start in life. Position paper. https://easpd.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Family-Centred_ECI_PP_EASPD_The_best_start_in_life.pdf

^[11] EASPD (2023). What place for young children with disabilities in the Child Guarantee National Action Plans? https://easpd.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/EU_Child_Guarantee_National_Action_Plans.pdf

^[12] COFACE. (June 2023). Child Guarantee Assessment. https://coface-eu.org/wpcontent/uploads/2023/06/COFACE_CGAssessment_June2023.pdf

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In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, women spend 3 hours more per day on unpaid care work than men. Add paid work into the mix and many women are essentially pulling a “double shift” every day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the load of unpaid care work shot up dramatically and it was mothers, and women in general, who took up the slack. 

Ensuring that men and women share responsibilities in the household equally requires real, sustainable change – from the attitudes and behaviors of individuals all the way to our policies and institutions.

Here are five ways men can get serious about smashing stereotypes and sharing responsibilities equally in the home.

It’s time to talk.

Combatting stereotypical gender roles within families and finding more equal ways of sharing tasks and duties begins by talking to each other. Who in your family does what, when, and how often? Talk about what’s fair, what’s right, and how you can all share tasks. Draw up a list to see how household tasks are currently shared and ask yourself, am I doing my fair share?  Remember, this isn’t a one-off talk, but rather the starting point for a longer-lasting change in the way you share unpaid care and domestic work!

Share the responsibility of care…

Women generally do a disproportionate amount of unpaid care and domestic work. However, chores do not have a gender, and women are not better at doing domestic or unpaid work than men, despite entrenched beliefs. In fact, men and women can equally pick up a broom, or care for a child or older relatives. So step up to your responsibilities and start tackling domestic tasks, from grocery shopping and reading to your children to the more tedious ones, like cleaning and ironing.  

…and the mental charge that comes with it 

There’s a mental and emotional toll to remembering, thinking about, and planning all these family tasks. Ask yourself, who takes care of scheduling medical appointments, remembering a grandparent’s upcoming birthday, liaising with school teachers, or deciding what to eat for dinner? Are you playing your part? Don’t underestimate the time it takes and the stress that comes with being the only one to think about and plan these tasks, and take responsibility for the mental charge that comes with unpaid care work.

Set an example, create change

Sharing domestic work and duties in a balanced and fair way works to create a more stress-free and positive family environment. But it can also impact family members in many aspects of their lives! When you share the workload at home, you also become a more engaged partner and father. And the benefits are passed on to your children. Men who grew up seeing more equal relationships between their parents are themselves more equal. You can also involve your children in discussing and sharing housework, for example using fun bingo cards developed in collaboration with COFACE Families Europe.

Sharing the tasks in the home is a win-win for everyone!  

Societal change begins in the family, but it does not stop there

While families can start to address inequalities at home right away, why not look at the bigger picture too. For example, women’s advancement in the workplace is hindered by the disproportionate responsibilities they continue to take on at home. How about pushing for broader change? Lobby your government, and your employer, to support more equal sharing of unpaid care work, flexible work arrangements, paternity leave, childcare and more help to care for older people. At work, women are far more likely to take on the unrecognized, unpaid, unpromotable tasks such as taking notes, event planning, tidying, etc. Why not push to stop that, smash stereotypes, and force change across the board?

Remember: Sharing family and household tasks isn’t about gestures. It’s about taking up responsibilities. Permanently.

This article was produced by MenEngage.

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On the 15th of December 2020, the European Commission published an initial proposal for a Regulation entitled the “Digital Services Act”. COFACE Families Europe has been following the development of this piece of legislation from the start, and responded to the initial consultation launched by the Commission.

As it stands, the current Digital Services Act proposal includes some notable progress, especially in the areas of advertising and online safety, but it also fails at addressing many issues such as pushing for easier data portability or empowering users of digital services platforms.

This short assessment first assessed to what extend COFACE proposals are reflected in the DSA, and secondly highlights articles which are important from a civil society perspective.

See full assessment here

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Brussels, 7th March 2021

First impressions by Elizabeth Gosme, Director of COFACE Families Europe

Twenty principles, three headline 2030 targets, a revised EU Social Scoreboard, a clear timeline of initiatives, and a shared political commitment and responsibility from European to local level. Using the COFACE recommendations as a benchmark, here below are my first impressions on the  European Pillar of Social Rights action plan published on 4th March 2021.

1.Two-generation approach to policy-making.

The interrelated well-being of children and their parents is reflected to a great extent in the action plan. Different types of family supports are referred to, directed at children and their parents: work-life balance measures which will have a strong social and economic impact, investment in early childhood education and care (ECEC), poverty reduction with an explicit target also on child poverty, as well as the upcoming Child Guarantee (in the form of a Council recommendation later this month). I am looking forward to the full EU work-life balance directive transposition (by August 2024, but hopefully well before); the revised Barcelona targets on ECEC in 2022; the implementation of the new indicator on the At-risk-of-poverty rate or exclusion for children (0—17) in the EU Social scoreboard; and finally the allocation of European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) resources to combat poverty including child poverty, even if it is a binding measure for only a select number of countries with higher child poverty rates. The Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027, launched separately to the Pillar yet strongly linked to the 2030 Social Pillar targets (“at least 80% of those aged 16-74 should have basic digital skills”), will be useful to bridge the digital divide for all generations, prevent further digital deprivation and empower digital citizens to ensure human rights are implemented online – something COFACE has been advocating for over 10 years.

2.Automatic social rights for families in vulnerable situations.

There was a call from some stakeholders to mainstream family policy across the action plan, and this has been done to a great extent, acknowledging also the importance of families as first social safety nets. The needs of families have been considered from birth to old age, and in many cases actions are based on an intergenerational approach. Families with children require automatic rights like access to family benefits, ECEC and flexible working, many of which are (sub)national public responsibilities. However, local measures can be backed by sound legislative and non-legislative EU frameworks, like the upcoming EU Child Guarantee targeting poorer families and children via a series of instruments and guidelines for all EU countries. Vulnerable situations occur during different life transitions, including in old age, which also requires automatic social rights for older persons to receive the health and social support they need, but also acknowledging the family members who support and/or care for them in the absence of adequate social protection systems. Family carers are recognised in the Pillar action plan, and we look forward to initiatives to boost automatic social protection rights for them as well. The Commission’s plan to map best practices in providing pension rights for care-related career breaks in pension schemes and promote the exchange of practices, as well as the upcoming initiative on Long-term care in 2022, must support the reforms urgently needed to support family carers.

3.Use real-time evidence provided by civil society.

The length of the EU public consultation on the Pillar action plan was extensive lasting nearly a year, allowing for many responses, including many contributions from civil society (local to international). The Staff Working Document in the Pillar action plan provides a useful overview. COFACE Families Europe waited until November 2020 to submit its response in order to take into account the latest feedback from its network on challenges for families, the impact of COVID-19, and to include the 2030 Child Compass launched on World Children’s Day (20th November) calling for family policy-makers to think beyond social policy when developing measures to address child and family well-being. There is a huge diversity in the civil society organisations heard in the consultation, including networks of NGOs (representing families and family support providers like COFACE), social economy players, public authorities, businesses, trade unions, to highlight but a few. A full understanding of the nature and strengths of different civil society networks is essential to understand the positions of each and how they can contribute to the implementation of the Pillar. The European Commission has acknowledged several COFACE recommendations (most of which have emerged through COFACE expert groups and statutory meetings), including on indicators. First the need to measure the number of hours spent by children in childcare, on top of enrolment in childcare, since access to childcare is not always full-time and even less for children with disabilities. Secondly, the recommendation to develop complementary (sub)indicators on work-life balance in the EU Social Scoreboard. I think EU policy-makers are fully aware that such participatory methods to co-shape the action plan must be sustained up until 2030 and beyond to ensure full implementation of the Social Pillar.

4.Monitoring, reporting and impact measurement.

There are some clear figures to be used as 2021 benchmarks to measure progress in 2025 of the targets set out in the action plan. COFACE will especially monitor the targets relating to halving the gender employment gap (although hoping that most countries will close the gap entirely), and increasing provision of ECEC to contribute to reconciliation between professional and private life, to supporting stronger female labour market participation, and also and especially to support healthy early childhood development (which is not explicitly stated in the action plan). However, given that the care responsibilities of families are not only for children (including children with special needs), but increasingly for the ageing population, a complementary target to boost professional care and family carers would have better reflected societal needs today, in line with the Commission’s Ageing Green paper. The Commission and the Social Protection Committee plan to map out areas in which further work is needed to ensure equal access to quality and affordable long-term care across the Union – it will be essential that in the transition to more performing social protection systems, family carers be socially recognised and supported adequately through access to a mix of rights (respite, financial compensation, adequately paid leaves from work, pension rights). Such investments would also help prevent further poverty and exclusion, potentially contributing to a stronger result than the Pillar action plan tentative ambition of a 15 million reduction of people at risk of poverty by 2030.

5.Concrete and priority actions to trigger real change.

The action plan has prioritised targets on employment, skills and tackling poverty, which broadly cover the 20 principles; while also developing a multitude of sub-actions which will be monitored closely by different EU civil society networks, and making links to other EU strategies relevant for social rights implementation. COFACE will be in a position to monitor closely the EU Gender equality strategy and Disability Rights Strategy, and to assess the impact of the future Council Recommendation establishing the European Child Guarantee, as well as the initiative on Long-Term Care to be proposed in 2022 to kick off policy reforms for more sustainable, affordable and quality services, including support to family carers. This was called for by many respondent organisations to the 2020 public consultation, highlighting the lack of adequate care leaves or systems to support informal carers, often women. Concrete actions also include various good practice measures taken by public authorities such as Belgium improving or creating family-related leaves for the self-employed (maternity leaves, paternity leaves, foster parent leaves); the use of the ESF by Lithuania to provide integrated social care and nursing services at home for older people or people with disabilities, including children; the use of the ESF by Croatia to enhance social protection of informal carers by redefining their status, reviewing the policy framework for long-term care services and implementing a new social benefit for informal care delivered at home; and the commitment of the city of Ljubljana to continue investing in family supports of different types (accessible childcare, schemes of parental rights and cash benefits, co-financing programmes of NGOs to provide out-of-school activities). The identification of specific examples of social rights implementation like the ones above are extremely helpful to replicate and upscale similar approaches across countries.

6.COVID-proofing and ensuring recovery policies fully respect social rights.

The action plan includes the intention of the European Commission to propose a Council Recommendation on minimum income in 2022 to effectively support and complement the policies of Member States – which will be useful leadership to trigger appropriate reforms, but will not be enough to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on families. The work in progress to adopt by end 2021 a delegated act to define a methodology for reporting on social expenditure under the Recovery and Resilience Facility will be essential to ensure the recovery is in line with the 20 principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights. The 2030 headline targets are deemed ambitious and realistic by the European Commission, in line with the most recent economic forecasts and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, highlighting that “the pandemic and its consequences on our societies and economies does not allow to predict fully the progression expected in the coming years”. But given the magnitude of the post COVID-19 challenge, and the huge efforts of mobilisation by the EU and its Member States, this crisis must be an opportunity for a political shift away from social policy dependence on economic forecasts, towards a European social policy that drives economic policy objectives towards a balance of growth and well-being through sound long-term public investments. This is not reflected in the Pillar action plan, but COFACE will continue to build bridges between social, economic and finance stakeholders, as will be the case on the 21st April 2021 during our webinar on unlocking new economic thinking for a sustainable future.

7.Upscale NGO-driven good practices through European networks.

The freshly adopted ESF+ (earlier this year), with EUR 88 billion from 2021-2027, will continue to be the EU’s main financial instrument to support the implementation of the Social Pillar. According to the ESF+ regulation, Member States must dedicate an appropriate amount to the capacity building of social partners and civil society organisations: 0.25% of ESF+ resources should be programmed when Member States have a country-specific recommendation (CSR) in this area. I hope that ESF+ authorities will use this opportunity to award operational grants to civil society organisations representing or supporting families, to give them the human resources needed to engage actively in policy and funding processes linked to the implementation of the Social Pillar. While the Employment and Social Innovation Programme (EaSI – now integrated in the ESF+) continues to help national authorities, social partners, civil society and other relevant actors to organise communication and engagement activities by collecting and exchanging the best practices across Europe – COFACE does this in various ways, including through its freshly launched European Family Lab. The EaSi-funded networks of course do much more than good practice transfer: they build capacity of their members to understand the European Pillar of Social Rights, build consensus across countries to have a strong voice in the EU policy/legal discussions, address common challenges like COVID-19, strengthen the civil society sector essential for European democracies, boost cross-country transfers of knowledge and innovation, maximise use of data for evidence-based policy systems.

8.Develop and consolidate EU legal frameworks with a social impact.

The Social Pillar can have a huge impact on society and the economy via non-legislative frameworks with strong operational guidance for governments, which we hope to see in the upcoming Child Guarantee as a key channel to help reduce family poverty. But legislative frameworks based on the European Treaties are also essential and have already been put forward, like the Directive on Work-Life Balance which entered into force in August 2019 with 3 years for transposition (plus two extra years for some specific provisions). This is one of the pieces of legislation supported actively by COFACE from 2017 to 2019, introducing minimum standards for family leaves and flexible working arrangements for workers with caring responsibilities, and promoting their equal take-up by women and men. Even before its adoption in 2019, this directive led to reforms across countries, and now in this transposition phase COFACE is pushing for upward reforms beyond the minimum standards of the directive. The European Parliament, ETUC and several countries, are now calling for a regulatory framework on the ‘right to disconnect’ to take into account the major telework developments in the last year. This has been acknowledged in the Pillar action plan, but is being left to the social partners to negotiate. Is the Autonomous Framework Agreement on Digitalisation adopted by the social partners in 2020 enough to ensure workers can exercise their right to disconnect from increasingly digital workplaces? Only time will tell.

9.Think beyond social and employment policy. 

Annex 1 of the action plan shows a multitude of EU frameworks and initiatives, which is quite overwhelming and confusing to read. Yet if all these frameworks are monitored and coordinated under the leadership of President von der Leyen herself, they should be complementary creating implementation dynamics in a wide range of fields linked to the 20 pillar principles. As stated in the Staff Working Document COFACE, together with other stakeholders, argues that social and employment policies can only be successful if there is consistency with wider economic, budgetary and fiscal policies. While the action plan mentions that the European Semester will allow for a coordinated monitoring of the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Plans to ensure they invest in policies “for the next generation, children and the youth, such as education and skills” (the sixth pillar of the RRF), consistency is also needed with initiatives in other areas. The action plan mentions an upcoming report in 2022 on access to essential services – this will surely need to include information on access to basic financial services, consumer credit, access to internet and digital infrastructure, also considering the links between digital deprivation and severe material deprivation. There is no mention of the Digital Services Act proposed in December 2020 to boost inter alia  effective protection of users’ fundamental rights online; but the action plan does mention an upcoming “2030 Digital Decade” initiative, as well as a white paper on artificial intelligence planned for later this year, which would focus among other things on redirecting algorithmic decision-making toward the promotion of human rights. The action plan also mentions the various measures which are part or linked to the recently launched Renovation Wave initiative in 2020, including a Commission recommendation on energy poverty, the revision the Energy Efficiency Directive, and the launch later this year of an Affordable Housing Initiative piloting 100 renovation districts.

In conclusion, this renewed Social Pillar package undoubtedly provides a strong EU ecosystem for national governments and stakeholders to implement social rights in their communities, and to engage COFACE civil society leaders across Europe. All in all, it’s a great effort and national governments should use this framework as guidance to urgently trigger the reforms needed, where this is not already the case.

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