‘The Commission strongly regrets the inclusion of paragraph 7 in Article 5 introducing the examination procedure referred to in Article 5 of Regulation (EU) No 182/2011 for the granting of Union financial assistance to the projects or parts of projects selected following every call for proposals on the basis of the work programmes referred to in article 5 of the Specific Programme Implementing Horizon 2020. The Commission recalls that it did not propose this procedure in any of the sectoral MFF acts. This was intended to simplify the MFF programmes to the benefit of the recipients of EU funding. The approval of grant decisions without committee scrutiny would accelerate the procedure reducing the time-to-grant to the advantage of beneficiaries and avoiding unnecessary red tape and costs. Moreover, the Commission recalls that the taking of grant decisions is part of its institutional prerogative relating to the execution of the budget and therefore should not be adopted through comitology.

The Commission also considers that this inclusion cannot serve as a precedent for other funding instruments.’