A delegation from the Government and the PSC parliamentary group, led by spokesperson Alícia Romero, held this Monday the last follow-up meeting on the execution of this year’s budget agreement, a meeting that the socialists call “disappointing” as a consequence of the explanations collected, which in his opinion do not justify the “paralysis” suffered by some of the agreed projects.
According to socialist sources, the pace of compliance with the agreement is not adequate, something they already denounced at the beginning of September, when they did an execution analysis based on information from the Government. Thus, since the beginning of summer, when the first follow-up meeting of the pact between both parties took place, “the measures implemented have gone from 11% to 16%,” the PSC highlights, a poor balance if one takes into account that The budget agreement consisted of a total of 281 measures.
Salvador Illa’s party regrets that the Government “has not provided satisfactory explanations or any documentation on the level of execution” of these measures, which is why they denounce the “lack of self-demand” and the “externalization of responsibilities” that, as they point out, , uses the Catalan Executive to justify “the paralysis” of certain projects.
This paralysis was already denounced by Illa himself during the last general policy debate in the Parliament, when he accused the Government of Pere Aragonès of not doing things and often not letting things be done: “The country does not fail, the Government fails”, he reproached before to warn that “the responsibility for executing the 2023 budget does not belong to the socialists, it belongs to Mr. Aragonès.”
Although the socialist leader offered to agree on next year’s budgets, he conditioned it on accelerating compliance with the current one. But the Government has not yet given any signs of wanting to approve the 2014 budgets, beyond Aragonès’s declaration, in the same debate, that he aspires to approve them with a “broad majority” of the Parliament. For this reason, Illa is full of reasons and for weeks she has started a round of contacts with social and economic agents to talk about the execution of current accounts and expectations for next year.
The PSC’s complaints about the slow pace of execution of budget agreements by the Catalan Executive have been a constant since the accounts were approved. In September, the socialists warned that “the Government is not going at the desired pace despite having the mechanisms and instruments to more diligently execute the agreed measures.”
With this pace, the socialist sources consulted see it as “impossible” that they can comply with it before the end of the year and give as an example of non-compliance matters whose responsibility is the exclusive responsibility of the Government, such as the payment of the increase in social services rates, which the agreement places at 4% and with retroactive effect from January 1, 2022.
Unlike the PSC, the Aragonès Executive sees the glass half full when they point out that of the 281 measures: 224 are underway; 44 are completed, and 13 are pending start. So “96% of the agreed measures are already underway or have been completed,” they assess. Furthermore, of the 13 measures that have not yet been started, six of them “cannot be executed until the Spanish Government makes its move,” they allege, and among them are the works on the Mediterranean corridor project or Rodalies, among others.
