Thank you for your invitation to join you today to outline our recent Communication on implementation and simplification and the strong simplification dimension of the 2025 Commission work programme.
As a starting point, I would like to emphasise that the EU can no longer afford to continue with business as usual.
The freedoms and quality of life that we enjoy cannot be taken for granted in the currently changing, complex world.
Technological change is accelerating. Trade tensions are rising. The geopolitical landscape is shifting.
Securing our prosperity and preserving our values depends more than ever on our ability to adapt, innovate, and compete.
This is why the Commission has prioritised enhancing Europe's competitiveness in this new mandate.
A few weeks ago, we presented the Competitiveness Compass that will guide our work on reigniting Europe's economic dynamism over the next five years.
The Compass sets out the Commission's approach to addresses the three core areas for action identified by the Draghi Report: innovation, decarbonisation and security.
It also places regulatory simplification as one of the areas on which we must deliver to revamp Europe's competitiveness.
Today, the EU is emerging from a period of very intense regulatory activity.
This activity was spurred forward by our shared determination to respond to rapid technological transformation and climate change.
Our commitment to securing the green and digital transitions has not wavered.
However, we need to be mindful of how we get there.
Now is the moment to take stock, reflect and adjust where necessary to make our rules simpler and more effective.
We must avoid allowing the accumulation of administrative burdens on people and business impede us from reaching our objectives.
As also highlighted in the Draghi report, the accumulation of rules over time at different levels, their increased complexity and implementation challenges are limiting our economic potential and our prosperity.
Our engagement with stakeholders confirms this.
Today, regulation is seen by more than 60% of EU companies as an obstacle to investment, with 55% of SMEs flagging regulatory obstacles and administrative burdens as their greatest challenge.
At the same time, it is also important to state that simplification and enhancing Europe's competitiveness are not ends in themselves.
They are important steps for productive sectors to flourish, protect existing jobs threatened by relocations and lead to the creation of more opportunities for European citizens.
Empowering our people and businesses in a more competitive Europe will help create a thriving economic base that can help the achievement of our green, digital and social objectives.
This is why we have made it a priority.
Last Tuesday, the Commission took a first important step towards making EU rules simpler and easier for citizens and businesses.
We adopted our strategy on implementation and simplification for the next five years, entitled "A simpler and faster Europe"
We also adopted our 2025 work programme, announcing a first set of specific measures.
Our Communication on implementation and simplification outlines a comprehensive set of tools to sharpen the quality of our regulatory framework, and to deliver on our agreed objectives.
It signals a change in the regulatory culture of the European Commission, focused on making sure that EU rules are as simple and cost-effective as possible, while they deliver on the ground.
It is constructed around four building blocks:
- ensuring EU policies deliver results,
- making Europe simpler and faster,
- improving the way we make new rules,
- and strengthening our work with co-legislators and stakeholders.
Let me know go through each of these four building blocks in turn.
Under the first block, we will focus on ensuring that EU policies deliver results on the ground.
We will give much more prominence to implementation at all stages of the policy cycle. This includes working with Member States and stakeholders early on, to identify future problems.
We will support Member States by preparing implementation strategies for all major legal acts, as well as explanatory templates and roadmaps for major directives.
We will also support them to build up administrative capacity and digitalisation, by using available tools for technical support and cross-border administrative cooperation, more effectively.
We will also implement a new consultation approach, called implementation dialogues, to identify good practices as well as issues of poor implementation, gold-plating or fragmentation, and uncover opportunities for simplification and harmonisation.
Each Commissioner will carry out at least two such dialogues every year, with a flexible approach, depending on the topic and area.
And we will of course continue to pursue a forceful enforcement action, wherever cooperation does not work.
Turning onto the second block, to "make Europe simpler and faster", we will propose steady and meaningful improvements in the administrative burdens faced by people and business, to better meet our economic, social and environmental goals.
We are setting ambitious targets for this, unveiled already in the Competitiveness Compass, reducing administrative burdens by at least 25% for all companies and 35% for SMEs.
We are applying these targets to a baseline of administrative costs, rather than just reporting costs, providing a clear indication that we are pursuing a holistic approach.
They translate into a goal of cutting administrative burdens by €37.5 billion during this mandate.
To achieve those targets, each Commissioner will gradually stress-test the EU acquis in his or her area of competence to identify opportunities for simplification while upholding policy objectives.
We are also introducing another new consultation approach, called reality checks to learn how EU rules are applied on the ground, directly from practitioners and administrators.
As I mentioned at the start, we are already translating the principles of this second block into concrete actions, starting with those announced in the 2025 Commission work programme.
11 out of the 18 new initiatives in the work programme aim at simplification, and they are complemented by 37 fitness checks and evaluations, which will in turn feed future simplification work.
The main simplification proposals for 2025 are the following five:
- A first omnibus proposal on sustainability reporting, to which I will come back in a second.
- Investment simplification, facilitating the deployment and reporting of InvestEU and the European Fund for Strategic Investments.
- A package including a new definition of small mid-caps, so that they can benefit from more targeted proportionate requirements.
- A digital package to ensure a simplified and more agile means to facilitate once-only reporting to avoid duplications.
- And fifth, a proposal to reduce complexity and administrative burden for farmers and national administrations in the context of the common agricultural policy.
We will put forward the first omnibus on sustainability reporting in the coming weeks.
It will cover the Taxonomy Regulation, the Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and it will also include targeted changes to the carbon border adjustment mechanism to the benefit of smaller importers, specifically for SMEs.
When it comes to the sustainability part, the proposal will seek a better alignment of the requirements with the needs of investors, proportionate timelines, financial metrics that do not discourage investments in smaller companies in transition, and more proportionate obligations relative to the scale of activities of different companies.
It will also address the trickle-down effect so that smaller companies along supply chains are not subjected to excessive reporting requests that were never intended by the legislators.
We believe that these changes are urgent and hence we want to move forward swiftly, and hopefully with the strong support of co-legislators'. We are working intensely for this purpose.
Let me now turn onto the third building block of our Communication on implementation and simplification: "improving the way we make new rules".
We will deepen the analysis of the impacts of our policies on competitiveness and SMEs, through reinforced checks in our impact assessments, including to identify mitigating measures.
We will also look more closely at delegated and implementing acts. This means impact assessments where there are policy options, significant impacts and no analysis was done for the basic act; and a cost analysis in cases where significant impacts are expected, even if there are no policy options to choose from.
The fourth and final block of our implementation and simplification strategy is a closer cooperation with co-legislators.
To deliver on our ambitious goals, we must work together and also seek to improve the ways in which we work.
Each Commissioner will present an annual progress report on implementation and enforcement to the respective Parliament Committee.
The reports will present progress towards key policy objectives, enforcement and simplification actions, and take stock of stakeholder dialogues, stress tests and reality checks.
We also wish to work closely with you to deliver fast progress on simplification measures.
This is why we identify them as such in our work programme, and are consulting actively with the Parliament on them, and would encourage you to handle them with priority.
We also hope to count on your support to minimise additional administrative burdens introduced during the legislative process.
For this purpose, we will put forward a simple methodology that could help you assess the impacts of significant amendments.
We would like to showcase the feasibility of doing this without unduly delaying the legislative process.
We also believe that it is important that each institution sets the resources to deliver on this commitment in our existing inter-institutional agreement.
To conclude, honourable Members, as you can see, this Commission is firmly committed to improving implementation and delivering simpler and more cost-efficient rules.
We hope to count with your support so that we can deliver fast and sustained changes on the ground, in the coming months and years.
I will stop here and look forward to our discussion. Thank you.
