Reacting to the Commission’s Better Regulation Communication, BusinessEurope Director General Markus J. Beyrer said:
“We support the continuity of the regulatory burden reduction agenda. We therefore welcome the Commission’s ambition to ensure a more effective application of good governance and better regulation principles. At the same time, it needs to be underlined that the pressing competitiveness concerns, as raised in the Draghi report, are still not sufficiently addressed.
Even if the Commission’s goal of reducing administrative burden by 25% is meant for the whole institutional cycle, it is still concerning that only a small fraction of the key regulatory burden reduction necessities for businesses identified in the BusinessEurope Omnibook have been addressed so far. As a result, companies have yet to feel a tangible improvement on the ground. We will carefully analyse the proposed Regulatory Deep Cleaning Action Plan and the 11 priorities for the Commission’s enforcement actions to see if they match the necessary ambition.
We also see a significant mismatch between the call of the European Spring Council to ambitiously simplify rules and reduce administrative burdens and the actual outcomes of negotiations with the European Parliament and the Council. It often appears as if there is a lack of political ownership by the co-legislators when it comes to simplification measures.
An example of this is the extremely worrying discussions by co-legislators on the Digital Omnibus, which could weaken key simplification proposals by the Commission around GDPR.
We urge the co-legislators to fully adhere to the objectives of simplification and burden reduction. Otherwise, vital investments will continue to happen outside Europe.”
