Debate: Reducing regulatory burden to unleash entrepreneurship and competitiveness
Date: WEDNESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2023
Speaker: Maroš Šefčovič
Language: EN

And, as we have been also reminded by several honourable Members who intervened, like Ms Ballarín Cereza or Mr Heinäluoma, I think through this modern and progressive legislation we actually built the European Union, which is socially just, which is environmentally friendly and through which we became champion in tackling climate change. I think this is what we should be absolutely proud of. Thanks to the so-called Brussels effect, we became a true global trendsetter and global standard-shaper.  And after having said all this, I also would like to reassure Mr Ferber, but also Ms Virkkunen and many other speakers, that we take the problem of administrative burden very, very seriously. If you look at our reporting and our efforts, just after one year of full operation of ‘one in, one out’, we brought to you the savings of more than EUR 7 billion – in one year. So I think this is really worth remarking, and I would like to underscore that this is a really important result. Since the President of the Commission announced the very laser-focused approach to cutting the reporting obligations, and we are really working very hard on that since March, we brought indeed the measures saving additional EUR 3 billion.  I would like to underline that we achieved that not through deregulation, not through legislative moratorium, but by changing legislative culture in the Commission. We are very much focused from the first moment, when our experts start to draft the legislation, to look at the costs. What would be the reporting obligations? How can we make this more user-friendly? We are introducing at every level of assessing the legislative proposal, the competitiveness checks. What would be the SMEs impact? How can we make sure that this proposal will pass the SME test, which I know is very important for many honourable Members in this House? And, of course, we have been discussed with you on many occasions – and I saw Ms Melchior here in the room – how to make 100% sure that our legislation would be digital by default. And we would use at every possible occasion the ‘once only’ principle – that once you share your data with the public institutions it is there, and the entrepreneur or the common citizen should not be asked another time to provide the same information.  But in other cases, we had to legislate actually to cut the burden. Just to give you two examples, which I referred to in my introductory remarks, we would not be able to bring you these billions of savings if we did not introduce the legislative proposals for VAT in the digital age, or to change the Union custom code, which makes it much easier, which makes it digital and which makes it uniform across the EU Member States.  So what I think is very important, and I very much appreciate the focus of this afternoon’s debate, is that we need to see the cutting of the red tape as a as a joint task. I am very obliged to Mr Repasi, who reminded us about the waves of amendments coming to the European Parliament, but also coming to the Council, and you know that these are our ongoing discussions that, unfortunately, they are coming in such a pace that we are not able to do the impact assessment of these amendments and very often we in the Commission are surprised how our proposal is actually changed in the course of the legislative process. And we respect that it is your right, we should do that, but we should also – and that is our ongoing plea – once we propose significant amendments, the European Parliament, the Council, should also be able to provide with the impact assessment what it means in the end for the outcome and final legislation. And on the last point, if we allow, because it was repeated several times in the discussion, it is also very important to work very closely with other Member States. And I think Ms Hahn presented very good examples of how very often even the very good legislation from the Member States is either not properly implemented or so much gold plated that it really increases the administrative burden.  So I very much appreciate that we have also the Presidency with us, because it is indeed a common task: European Parliament, Council, Commission, and the implementation on the regional and national level would be very important.  The last point, Madam President, a very concrete point, which we are, of course, happy to provide more detailed information to Mr Ferber and Mr Hoogeveen on the corporate sustainable reporting directive. We have been doing our utmost and we wanted to have the best possible advice, so we have been working with the European Financial Advisory Board to help us to streamline the European sustainable standards. So this is done. We are, of course, measuring the impact and we will be coming back to you with a proper reporting on how this falls and how this is reported under the ‘one in, one out’ rule. Next year, we will be presenting the next annual burden survey.  So once again, Madam President, thank you very much for this debate, and thank you very much for creating this opportunity to underline that this is our common task, and we, from the European Commission, will take it and are taking it very, very seriously.