Pnrr, 6.1 billion advances from regions and local authorities
Local and regional authorities have spent EUR 21.4 billion but have so far only received EUR 15.3 billion. In February, a leap in the number of completed projects (42%), delays of six months to two years for 13% of interventions
Key points
Regions, provinces, municipalities, and health administrations have advanced 6.1 billion in payments for NRP projects, while waiting for the recognition of the funds by the ministries in charge of the interventions. As the 30 June deadline approaches, the share of completed projects experiences a leap, to 42% in mid-February from the 2% recorded only six months earlier, but remains far from the target. And, above all, the gap is widening between the rate of achievement of the objectives certified by the European audits, which, with the arrival of the ninth instalment expected shortly, will have credited Italia with 85.4% of the Plan's overall financing, and the degree of progress even in the middle of the financial period recorded by the official monitoring, which for now does not go beyond 44%.
The gap between targets met and projects completed
In its new Report on the state of implementation of the projects of the territorial authorities financed by the NRP and the National Complementary Plan (Resolution 11/2026 of the Autonomies section, issued yesterday), the Court of Auditors plunges the scalpel of its analysis into one of the most critical (at least apparent) contradictions in the Plan's progress picture, generated by the gap between the data on compliance with milestones and targets that is proceeding smoothly and a share of completed projects and payments made that instead continues to remain much more modest. There are fewer and fewer months to close this gap.
Some clarification is in order. In the Report published yesterday, monumental as usual with its detailed analyses and sectoral focuses that thicken the 271 pages of the document with data and tables, the Court uses data updated on 13 February. The source of the information is, as always, the ReGis, the computerized census of the General Accounting Office, which, as insiders know, is not always promptly (euphemism) fed by those implementing the interventions, to the point that the last NRP decree has increased obligations and penalties with effects that should be seen from the next releases (the first deadline for the mandatory monthly update was 12 days ago).
Only 42.1% concluded among local authorities
That said, however, the numbers are screaming. And even in the specific field of territorial authorities, a broad field with its 122,092 projects financed with more than 48.5 billion Pnrr distributed among 8,382 administrations, they show that by mid-February the stamp of conclusion had only been placed on 51,390 projects, 42.1% of the total; and that it was mainly the initiatives that ran the lightest in financial terms, which in fact absorbed no more than 3.7 billion (7.6% of the funds allocated to territorial authorities). The game remains open, because investments with clear delays of between six months and two years account for 13%: but data on this point are incomplete, and there is little time left to play.
The NRP, explains the philosophy behind the Recovery, is 'performance based', and thus bases its audits on the achievement of targets and not on the proportion of payments made. But it is difficult to imagine that the resources linked to the various measures were powerfully overestimated at the outset, or that targets and milestones are always met with multibillion-dollar savings compared to the allocated resources. The figure of actual payments, the Court therefore warns, "does not only have accounting significance, but constitutes an indirect indicator of the distance between administrative progress, physical completion and the real capacity to transform resources into works, services and actual benefits for the territories".
