Council looks for more thorough project evaluations

National governments have called on the European Commission to explore ways of improving how proposals to the EU’s R&D programme are evaluated.

In conclusions adopted on 12 March, the Council of the EU urged the Commission to re-examine how evaluators assess project proposals submitted for funding under the programme. It noted that “insufficient time has often been allocated to evaluations” and stressed that high standards were needed.

The Council was responding to a 2018 report from the European Court of Auditors. This cited a survey of evaluators, published in 2016, in which 44 per cent of respondents complained that they had been compensated for less time than they needed for evaluations. The Council also called for remuneration levels to be reviewed, noting that these had been unchanged for 10 years.