Φεβ122019

FIEC President at EU Industry Days

FIEC President Kjetil Tonning was a speaker at one of the events organised during the European Commission’s EU Industry Days in Brussels last week. During a session organised by the Concrete Dialogue, he emphasised the need for collaboration along the construction value chain and spoke about some of the activities FIEC has undertaken over the last year to support the transformation of the industry.  Amongst these, he referred to the joint industry manifesto for digitalisation.

 

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Kick-off of the “Blueprint” project

The 24 partners from 12 different countries gathered in Madrid (ES) on 31/1 and 1/2 for the kick-off meeting of the “Blueprint” project, co-financed by the EU Erasmus+ programme.
This project, which is coordinated by the Spanish “Fundación Laboral de la Construcción”, aims at developing a long term strategy for addressing the problem of skills gaps/mismatches that construction companies are facing in many EU Member States. The main focus will be on skills related to energy efficiency, circular economy and digitalisation, which constitute major challenges for the construction industry.
The partners, which include Social Partners from the EU and the national level, as well as training centres, will, amongst other things, develop tools aimed at better analysis of the expected future developments in the above mentioned fields and at ensuring their adequate integration in the training schemes.
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Public procurement: Commission urges 15 Member States to comply with public procurement and concessions rules

On 24th January, the Commission sent letters of formal notice to 15 Member States regarding the conformity of their national legislation with EU rules on public procurement and concessions (namely Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). These letters are the result of a compliance check conducted by the Commission to see whether the transposed national rules comply with the EU Directives.
The new rules (Directive 2014/24/EU, Directive 2014/25/EU and Directive 2014/23/EU) had to be transposed by Member States into national law by 18th April 2016.
Member States now have two months to reply to the arguments put forward by the Commission; otherwise, the Commission may decide to follow up with the sending of a reasoned opinion.
The same assessment is being undertaken or will be carried out for the remainder of Member States, where transposition was completed with important delays.

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