The EIB has given a loan of €55 million to Korian, "the leading European care services group for elderly and fragile people", for 67 different construction projects to be completed in 2021 and early 2022.
What's worthy of note is that the EU funding is going to buildings that are Near-zero energy (NZEB) (it's a French 'NF Habitat HQE' standard), and yet these will be new buildings, which means that under EU law, they have to be NZEB anyway, and yet normally the EU won't fund projects that do no better than meet existing legal requirements. But here energy efficiency is just one element of a project that meets two other high EU objectives:
- It concerns medicalised housing that enables people who can't stay in their homes to avoid a long-term care nursing home.
- All 67 projects are in rural and semi-rural areas, allowing people to remain in their local village or small town while also enabling carers to find work close to home. That super-ticks all the EU boxes about keeping rural communities alive. In Commissioner Gentiloni's eurowords "a win-win situation for both regional and social cohesion".
Full report under epf20-89 of 22.12.2020
