EU Budget Tracking Rules Name Roma but Still Cannot Say Whether Their Lives Improve, Roma Foundation for Europe says

Brussels, 2 September 2026 – The European Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs (EMPL) yesterday agreed on its opinion on the European Commission’s Performance Framework—including recommending tying progress on Roma inclusion to the European Social Fund and a proposal for a mid-term review of the progress achieved. But the Roma Foundation for Europe says if the Budgets committee does not adopt the opinion it will miss the opportunity to show whether Roma lives actually improve. 

In its current form, the European Union’s budget expenditure tracking and performance framework—which will decide how Brussels measures close to €2 trillion in spending across every EU programme through 2034—adds dedicated fields for Roma employment, education, upskilling and social inclusion. However, while it names Roma explicitly rather than folding them into an anonymous “vulnerable groups” line—a clear step forward—the proposal falls short of designing a system that measures actual change, not just completion of initiatives. 

The European Commission presents the proposed framework—which is expected to be finalised in 2027 following negotiations with the Parliament and Council—as a matter of good housekeeping: fewer indicators, one tracking system and a clearer way to show taxpayers what EU money delivers. None of the Roma indicators, however, is broken down by ethnic or racial origin—only by gender. A government can therefore report that its Roma-labelled budget line was used without ever finding out whether Roma participated, or whether the gap actually narrowed, making it impossible to track progress. 

Framework incentivises quick results over lasting change

The current proposal risks repeating mistakes that have been made in other contexts and creates the wrong incentives for governments to signal progress. The European Court of Auditors concluded last year that similar reskilling milestones under the Recovery and Resilience Facility—the financial instrument that helped member states recover after the Covid-19 pandemic, and the model for this framework—varied widely between countries. Governments were incentivised to hit whichever milestone was fastest and safest to report.

“Employment stability, school progression and institutional change take time and depend on the local economy,” Korunovska said. “Tying annual payments mechanically to results like these gives authorities an incentive to select participants who are easiest to place and avoid the areas with the largest gaps. The opinion voted on yesterday raises this issue and should be followed.”

Roma organisations need to play a role in data collection

Similarly, a uniform framework should allow for place-based baselines, comparing progress from different starting conditions rather than ranking municipalities on raw outcomes they do not fully control—a labour market, school network or staffing level is not the same everywhere. This is one area where Roma experience can improve the framework for everyone. Programmes in poorer areas, remote communities and neighbourhoods with weak services pose challenges in data collection. A framework designed with Roma practitioners would increase the quality of data and help tell genuine performance apart from mere administrative capacity to collect data and meet targets that say little about the actual effectiveness of the measures.

The Roma Foundation for Europe calls on the Budgets committee and Parliament to:

• Replace completion-based indicators for Roma inclusion with outcome measures such as sustained employment, recognised qualifications and verified change in income or living standards
• Require every Roma-related indicator to be disaggregated by ethnic or racial origin, supporting and building on Eurostat’s ongoing work to standardise this data among EU member states, and elevate Roma as a priority group for EU-level statistics
• Separate what triggers payment from what drives evaluation, so governments are rewarded for genuine outcomes rather than whichever milestone is fastest to report

Furthermore, indicators are part of the Annex and not the regulation, so the Commission can amend intervention fields, coefficients and indicators through delegated acts, instruments that the Parliament and Council can only veto, not negotiate. In other words, the Commission can unilaterally change what success looks like. It should be legally required to conduct independent, third-party evaluations—combining outcome data with qualitative assessment—rather than relying on member states’ self-reported figures.

“Without addressing these problems, the framework will not measure performance, and it will do nothing to stop money being wasted,” Korunovska said. “It will be performative and in the case of Roma, it will sell results as success, even if Roma lives have not changed.”