The Commission provides a number of grants to incentivise projects of pan-European importance, e.g. trans-European networks, environment and climate change mitigation, European competitiveness. The grants for trans-European transport networks provide a good example for the mechanics of these grants.
The EU grants to promote investments in TEN-T are of potential interest to public sector authorities involved in the financial planning of TEN-T projects. The majority of available TEN-T grants are offered to support studies or works, which contribute to the TEN-T programme priorities such as cross border linkages, environmentally friendly transport, removing bottlenecks and pan-European traffic management systems. TEN-T funding opportunities are open to all EU Member States and, with the agreement of the Member States concerned, explicitly also to joint undertakings and PPPs.
The TEN-T Executive Agency, closely linked to the Directorate-General Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE) responsible for managing the technical and financial implementation of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) programme, currently manages over 300 individual grant decisions. There are some large PPPs within the TEN-T and grants have been used to support studies for the project preparation phase, such as the Portuguese High Speed Rail project, RAVE. In the 2010 Annual Call, funding was explicitly offered for the first time for feasibility studies for projects with PPP potential and for studies to bring PPPs to maturity. With respect to the funding of works in PPPs, there are no explicit restrictions. The TEN Regulation include a grant developed to support construction works in the context of availability payment schemes, although deficiencies in its design have limited its use. These issues are discussed more fully in Section V.
TEN-T funds are made available as free grants to promote and incentivise projects that implement TEN-T schemes.