In the course of the last three years, the Commission has sought a closer integration of the Europe Direct services – the Europe Direct Contact Centre and the Network of around 450 Europe Direct Information Centres, and Your Europe-Citizens web portal in order to provide citizens with a fully multilingual and multichannel information platform: online, by telephone, by e-mail and in person.

64. Calls on the Member States to submit national reform programmes consistent with the aim of the Platform and with the Union's objectives of social and sustainable development, and, supporting the Commission's recognition that poverty ‘is unacceptable in 21st-century Europe’, calls on them to refrain from calling into question wage indexation systems and collective labour agreements or restricting, in an unreasonable and unjustified way, their capacity for investment and social spending in the context of economic governance, whilst ...[+++]ensuring the sustainability of public finances and the creation of well-paid jobs, bearing in mind that poverty reduction is an essential corollary of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth; calls for clarification of the status of national action plans for social inclusion and, in particular, the question of their integration into national reform programmes under the Europe 2020 strategy; calls on the Commission to develop country-specific recommendations with a view to meeting the poverty reduction target, especially in the event that those programmes are not successful, bearing in mind that poverty reduction requires us to step up our efforts and mobilise all parties and all our resources to reduce poverty and extreme poverty significantly in the medium term, and to reduce greatly or eradicate poverty by 2020 at the latest; proposes that the Commission draw up guidelines at European level for the Member States so as to ensure that local authorities and other stakeholders participate effectively in the drafting of national reform programmes; notes that ‘territorial pacts’ potentially offer the most comprehensive and consistent means of involving local authorities in this process, as proposed in the Fifth Cohesion Report; believes that the Europe 2020 target of reducing the number of people at risk of poverty by 20 million can be achieved only if the austerity measures currently being taken in the EU, and those to be taken in the ...

15. Calls on the Commission to take full account of the correct horizontal social clause as specified in Article 9 TFEU, under which the EU has to take into account requirements linked to the promotion of a high level of employment, the guarantee of adequate social protection, the fight against social exclusion, and a high level of education, training and protection of human health, and calls on the Commission to specify how the Platform will affect assessments of the implementation of that clause; calls for more in-depth social impact assessments of EU policies, even where those policies are initiated by the ...[+++]European Council rather than the Commission, as in the case of the Euro Plus pact; takes the view that such in-depth analysis of the application of this clause will make it possible to avoid a levelling-down of social standards in Europe and facilitate the development of a common social basis in Europe; calls for this social impact assessment to be carried out in conjunction with associations active in combating poverty, and for it to take the situation of the poorest people in Europe as a benchmark; takes the view that such assessments should involve Parliament, the Committee of the Regions, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Commission departments responsible for social affairs, under the supervision of a director-general reporting to the Commission Secretariat;

E. whereas one of the five major objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy is the soft target – i.e. not coupled with sanctions – of reducing the number of people at risk of poverty by 20 million, on the basis of three indicators agreed upon by the Member States (the at-risk-of-poverty rate after social transfers, the severe material deprivation index and the percentage of people living in jobless households or households with very low work intensity); whereas, although this target acknowledges the importance of combating poverty and social exclusion, the figures of 116 million people at risk of poverty and 42 million living in conditions ...[+++] of severe material deprivation mean that, from the outset, it reflects the abandonment of millions of people in Europe, with the associated risk of generating threshold effects which exclude the most vulnerable people from the scope of policies geared to measurable results; whereas, if the most intractable situations are not addressed from the outset, the policies implemented will have no impact on them; whereas the European Platform against Poverty is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 strategy;

21. Calls for the Parliament's Employment Committee to be granted an explicit role in the Platform, particularly in monitoring the effectiveness of the Platform and of EU and Member State policies designed to reduce poverty and social exclusion, in the context of the Europe 2020 strategy;

· To create a single, multilingual electronic data and exchange platform, associated, where appropriate, with the Social Innovation Europe Platform[25] and the ‘Enterprise Europe Network’ for social entrepreneurs, incubators and clusters, social investors and people working with them.