On 13-14 June 2019, a workshop for Directors- General/Presidents of National Statistical Institutes of the European and EFTA countries was carried out in Krakow. It was the first event of such nature co organised by Statistics Poland. The workshop was dedicated to priority-setting within the European Statistical System (ESS) and was a response to the indentified issues resulted from:

• continuous changes emerging in societies, economies and political environments what results in new demands for statistical information describing new phenomena both at national end European level,
• need for decreasing the costs of statistical production,
• less resources for the statistics needs available at national level related to the overall trend towards lowering public expenditures.

The workshop was prepared by the Task Force whose member is the President of Statistics Poland. The meeting gathered the majority of top management from National Statistical Institutes of the EU. They, together with Eurostat Director General, discussed the roles of the future priority setting within the ESS. The workshop was aimed at merging the existing instruments of priority setting into integrated mechanism which will be a part of the European Statistics planning process within the framework of the new financial perspective.

During the first session the participants discussed the main elements of an integrated prioritisation and review mechanism to be embedded in the planning framework for European Statistics in the 2021-27 period.

The second session was dedicated to exploring how different user groups can be better involved in the different stages of the prioritisation process.

The third session, chaired by the President of Statistics Poland, reflected on the new ways of conducting systematic domain-specific reviews and how the review outcomes could feed into future statistical work programmes.

As a result of the discussions, the need for elaboration a Multiannual Action Plan that would define domain-specific and cross-cutting priorities for 2021-2027 was confirmed. The work in this area will be continued with the constant involvement of Statistics Poland representatives. It was also agreed that a special task force would be dedicated to that issue and the mandate of the task force will be prepared by Eurostat soon.