6 SELECTION OF PROJECTS
115. The Government told us that the selection
of projects for funding is based on criteria set out in each call
for proposals, including: "scientific and technological excellence,
relevance to the objectives of the specific programme, potential
for promoting innovation and the management ability to carry out
the project successfully."[132]
The Government confirmed the Commission line that there are no
national quotas when allocating funding under FP6. The Commission
states that, providing the applicants satisfy the legal and administrative
criteria, and their proposals are in accordance with programme
objectives, the sole selection criteria is the quality of the
proposals.[133]
116. The Government told us that all eligible
proposals are evaluated with the help of outside independent experts
appointed by the Commission from a database they hold of individuals
who have either nominated themselves or been proposed by a Member
State research institution.[134]
Professor Manfred Horvat, told the Committee that the Commission
uses a modified peer system which is applied with care:
"It has to be emphasised that it is an excellent
approach to follow a two stage procedure of first individual evaluation
by independent experts and than an interactive consensus meeting
between those experts. This ensures that the experts have to defend
their individual findings in a group of other experts in a professional
interaction. This approach is important for ensuring high quality
standards of the evaluation procedure, that would be lost to a
certain extent when only remote evaluation would be applied."[135]
117. In addition, the new instruments will
also be evaluated by a hearing of the project consortium by a
panel of evaluators, which will probably involve more than three
independent experts.[136]
118. However, Professor Horvat commented
that whilst the submission, evaluation and selection of EU projects
was well organised, after the closing of a call, proposers remained
ill informed: "proposers are confronted with the Commission
acting as a 'black box', with no information on the progress in
processing the submitted proposals, often for a rather long time."[137]
119. The CBI claimed that some of its members
considered the selection process was a "black art",
whilst to others it seemed relatively fair.[138]
As will be further discussed below, there was some suspicion amongst
evidence submitted to the Committee that projects were selected
for their benefit to the social and cultural integration of Europe
rather than for their scientific excellence. Feedback on why certain
proposals failed was also requested to enable greater transparency
of the process.[139]
We believe that the Commission needs to emphasise the basis
on which the selection of projects is made, and give greater feedback
to applicants on the reasons for failure.
132 Ev
125 Back
133 Participating
in European Research, p 46 Back
134 Ev 124 Back
135 Ev 164 Back
136 Ev 164 Back
137 Ev 164 Back
138 Ev 44 Back
139 See para
132. Back
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