Early today, Eurodiaconia has published its new contribution to the Social Pillar titled “Implementing the European Pillar of Social Rights: The way forward“.
The decisive factor for Eurodiaconia is not that the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) and its upcoming action plan exists as a text, but that it delivers an improved social reality of people’s lives through appropriate implementation initiatives at EU level and in the Member States, thus promoting improved economic and social cohesion in the EU.
As many of the tools to deliver on the ESPR are in the hands of member states, as well as social partners and civil society, Eurodiaconia will continue to be working with our members to determine how we can play our part in making the full implementation of the 20 principles a reality, and what our priorities should be.
Firstly, in this new paper we want to highlight the need to strengthen the role of social service providers and the provision of quality social services as a pre-condition for a successful Pillar implementation if we want to move towards a social, sustainable and equitable Europe. Then we will focus on specific Pillar principles and what we would like to see addressed regarding policy actions or legal initiatives (focussing on the EU level) in the upcoming action plan to ambitiously implement the Social Pillar. The final chapter will focus on the feedback we gathered in two membership surveys in 2020 on what our members see as main priorities, implementation gaps and how the follow-up of the action plan should be organised. Eurodiaconia is committed to continuing to support the implementation process together with all our members in Europe.
The European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) has been jointly proclaimed by the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament on the 17th November 2017 at the Social Summit in Gothenburg, Sweden. In this document, Eurodiaconia sets out its proposal
for an action plan to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights, as a part of its response to the European Commission’s public consultation. It mainly builds on Eurodiaconia’s policy position papers and capacity building webinars on the EPSR developed together over the last three years with our members, but also on the feedback, we gathered from members in a recently conducted survey specifically for this contribution.
To know more about Eurodiaconia’s proposals for an action plan to implement the EPSR, check our new report.