Debate: Better regulation: joining forces to make better laws
Date: THURSDAY, 7 JULY 2022
Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič
Language: EN

And I think that also this debate clearly highlighted what kind of complex political and at the same time technical topic we are we are discussing this morning, and that all of you underline what kind of great benefits to our citizens and businesses we can bring if we get this right. And of course, to do so, we need to – many of you referred to it – listen better, get closer to our stakeholders, engage them more, and gather many and different views. And I want to reassure you that we are permanently looking into ways how to improve further the consultations with our citizens, despite the fact that the OECD is ranking us as best public administration in the world when it comes to the quality of consultations with stakeholders.  But we are going to introduce also a pan-European initiative and clear citizens proposals and citizens panels, where we can discuss our proposals before they become official proposals.  We are going to use the digital platform which we developed for better communicating with our citizens, where we are using, for example, artificial intelligence to translate automatically so everyone can communicate with everyone in their own language, which I believe will bring us closer together. And this was, I would say, also a message Mr Mituta was presenting to us and what we discussed together, working in one working group with our citizens.  What we need to do more is deliver more and precise facts and base our policies on evidence. And we are doing this through a very thorough impact assessment, which we are working on together with our DGs and with the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, to which I will come to in a second.  And then I think, many of you also highlighted, and I think this is our common task, how we would explain more transparently, in a more understandable language, in a simple way, what legislation is about, how to respect it, and what kind of goods and benefits it brings to European businesses, to the European democracy, and to European political life, and on how we can always do better. But I think that thanks to the permanent focus the European Parliament is paying to this area, we are improving our performance every year.  If you allow me just to elaborate on the three areas, which I heard the most on from the honourable Members, three areas of even increased focus. First, I agree with you, and I think it was very well described by Madame Regimenti that we need to better anticipate the challenges that are emerging and ensure that we develop agile, futureproof legislation.  And therefore, what we do right now systematically at DG level, and the Regulatory Scrutiny Board takes it into account as well, future proofing of our legislation where we really are taking the best evidence from our foresight reports and making sure that we would have instruments in every legislation to adjust the proposals to future development.  Second, I agree with all of you who said that it would be crucial to strike the right balance in the implementation of the new one-in, one-out approach in burden reduction, while keeping the benefits of this legislation in mind.  Mrs Toom was referring to important legislation like the DSA, DMA, CBAM, all of them, which are huge impacts on how our businesses and citizens would live.  Mr Kelly and Madam Dlabajová were referring to the importance of SMEs and therefore we transform our SMEs test to be regular, to be systemic, and that the window for SMEs is properly functioning. And to Mr Wölken and Mr Scholz, I just would like to reassure them that if it comes to one-in, one-out, we really develop the detailed guidelines for services, including the internal IT tool for calculating and encoding their costs. We call it the one-in, one-out calculator. But there is nothing secret or nothing difficult about this, because this calculator is based on the standard cost model, which is used by major organisations. Again, we discussed it in to great extent with OECD, and the services are using the standard cost model for the daily routine. And what we did was that we included it into our Better Regulation toolbox and data is taking from the impact assessments and are publicly known.  And we are going to present you the first results of this one-in, one-out to our pilot experience in this annual burden survey and the full report not only on how we are treating the issue, of course, but also how we are going to offset it in the next year.  Third, a very important point mentioned by many of you was that we can do much more together, and I think that we indeed need to fully implement our internal institutional agreement on better law-making because it is our joint responsibility and we should legislate this efficiently as possible.  And two points, one to Mr Barrena Arza, I think that we had an excellent report from Mr Rangel on the right of initiative, where thanks to our close-ups and coordination, we have 100% success of 18 initiative reports you presented. We delivered 18 very concrete responses in the form of the proposals from the Commission, and I totally agree with our colleague, Mr López Aguilar, pressure on better transposition and delivery from the Member States if it comes to European law.  Madame Hautala, she asked me before for the response, and I would like to say that if we want, and if we were to bring our specific tailor-made rules on different administrative procedures within one single legal act, we would, in our opinion, rather reduce than increase the transparency and clarity of existing rules. But of course, I am very much looking forward to seeing the fresh ideas coming from there, from the JURI Committee, so we can work on this issue together.  And to Mr Ruiz Devesa, I just would like to reassure him that the joint legislative portal will show the formal steps of the law-making process in the ordinary legislative procedures and also in formal interinstitutional negotiations. So I hope that it would bring additional transparency and clarity to our decision-making process.  Mr President, you’ve been very gentle with me, letting me go over the time, so I would just conclude with reassuring the Members of the European Parliament that we are open for any ideas, any suggestions how to make it clear, as Madam Niebler was saying, to the eventual applicants for the EU funds to find the proper information on the websites. That we do not want to legislate more, but we want to legislate better and not to legislate worse. And so these would be the principles, which would guide us in the future. And I am looking forward to the close cooperation with the Parliament on this issue. And once again, I want to congratulate Mr Tiemo Wölken for his excellent report.