The former Italian minister and current president of the Jacques Delors Institute, Enrico Letta, included the proposal of a “28 States” for the EU in the report that the European Council asked him to “look to the future by searching for the roots”. , in his own words. In this “fictitious” administrative State, companies could act “freely”, under the same bureaucratic conditions, in any Member State. This Wednesday, the Minister of Economy of our country, Carlos Body, presented this idea to the Autonomous Communities, adapted to Spain.
“We have 17 Autonomous Communities with differentiated regulations and a certain heterogeneity. What we want is to move forward in a “regime 20” [partiendo de las 17 regiones y las dos ciudades autónomas, Ceuta y Melilla] to lighten and increase the capacity that our companies have in any part of the country to operate quickly and efficiently,” Body explained last week during a conference at the General Council of Economists (CGE).
This Wednesday, the Minister of Economy transferred this proposal to the “Sectoral Conference for the Improvement of Regulation and the Business Climate”. That is, to the representatives of the Autonomous Communities, local entities, the president of the newly created Productivity Council, Juan Francisco Jiménez and the president of the Chamber of Commerce, José Luis Bonet.
“The idea is to move forward in the regulatory field and have a common and shared diagnosis of the situation,” Corps had said. In practice, the Ministry of Economy is looking for sufficient minimum characteristics “so that a company that meets them can operate indiscriminately between the different Autonomous Communities.”
At this Wednesday’s meeting, it was agreed to start identifying areas for improvement by sector. The next meeting will take place in December. Initially, the focus is on “retail and hospitality; regulated professions; transport; education; and infrastructure construction. And one of the priorities is the management of European funds, and in particular the Recovery Plan.
“Once this analysis has been carried out, we will promote the development of regulatory solutions, which can range from the adoption of different standard ordinances, to mutual recognition between administrations, to regulatory modifications or to technological solutions,” they explain from the Ministry of Corps, which indicated that “the reception” has been good.
In this line of work, the update of the Model Ordinance for the exercise of retail activities and the provision of services was presented, which has been worked on in recent months in collaboration with the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces and the Local Commission for Better Regulation.
The implementation of this new standard ordinance is an example of optimizing the regulatory framework of the sector and will allow progress in administrative simplification, promoting the use of responsible declarations against authorizations, reducing administrative procedures and streamlining the implementation of economic activities. Likewise, its use will promote standardization, thus increasing legal certainty and transparency for companies. Finally, its implementation will improve the efficiency of the use of public resources, thus making it possible to take advantage of economies of scale in the development of regulations.
“A peninsular regime” that includes Portugal
The minister assures that he has already discussed this issue with Letta himself, “who is pleased that Spain is becoming a pioneer in this area.”
“This could be the seed that will allow us later, for example, to discuss with Portugal and begin to extend these common characteristics to a peninsular regime, and not just to our autonomous communities,” explained the Corps itself.
