France, Germany and Italy eye ‘omnibus’ law to cut regulatory burden

Economic and business ministers from France, Germany and Italy are set to sketch out plans for a sweeping  ‘omnibus’ law to cut red tape and regulatory requirements for businesses on Monday (8 April), turbo-charging industrialists’ demand for a European Industrial deal.

Bruno Le Maire, France’s economic and finance minister, will discuss a review “of all European standards” with Germany’s economic minister Robert Habeck, and Italy’s minister for businesses Adolfo Urso, in a meeting in Paris on Monday.

The ministers’ meeting will be under the motto of “competitiveness, productivity, and green technologies,” a spokesperson of the German economics ministry told Euractiv but did not want to give any details on what might be agreed.

“Europe must be the continent of prosperity. It must not be the continent of red tape,“ Le Maire told journalists at a briefing on Thursday (4 April), adding that the 27-country bloc “must […] drastically simplify European rules and standards.”

“I will be proposing an omnibus directive to review all European standards with a view to simplifying, streamlining, or abolishing them,” Le Maire said.

The French minister’s office said Le Maire’s sense of urgency was “totally” shared by his counterparts.

An ‘omnibus’ law describes a measure that can amend several other regulations, combining multiple topics. The last ‘omnibus directive’ the EU adopted in 2019 dealt with consumer rights, changing four directives that concerned unfair commercial practices and price transparency.

By centering on legislative routes to trim down requirements on businesses, Monday’s meeting seems poised to align some key priorities for the next EU mandate with calls put forward in February by leading EU industrialists, industry associations and manufacturing sectors’ trade unions as part of the so-called Antwerp Declaration.

The industry manifesto formally introduced the demand for a “European Industrial Deal” to complement the bloc’s Green Deal and called for an “omnibus” proposal to be “the first piece of legislation to be presented in the next EU institutional cycle.”

Such a law should “take corrective measures on all relevant existing EU regulations,” it said, following the objective to “eliminate regulatory incoherence, conflicting objectives […] and over-reporting”. 

The Antwerp manifesto also called on the next Commission to “install a First Vice-President” responsible for implementing and aligning the industrial deal’s objectives, across all the EU executive’s units and legislations.

NGO fears broader deregulation agenda

The timing of Monday’s meeting is not a coincidence, as EU legislators await a high-level report on boosting the Single Market by former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta next week – which will inform discussions among the bloc’s leaders in their special summit on 17 April. 

The bloc has cast high expectations on both Letta’s report and on a separate set of recommendations on shoring up competitiveness expected to be outlined by former ECB President Mario Draghi in June.

However, NGOs warn against the risk of watering down regulatory standards – in particular fearing that an omnibus law could be part of a broader deregulation agenda.

“An Omnibus proposal as mentioned in the Antwerp declaration would mean a shortcut for industry to make competitiveness a higher priority in EU legislation,” Nina Holland, researcher at the Corporate Europe Observatory, told Euractiv.

Such demands could be a call for “weakening a potentially long list of social and environmental legislation that they claim harms their competitiveness,” said Holland.

However, Marco Mensink, director general of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), which coordinated the Antwerp Declaration, told Euractiv that it was “not a deregulation agenda at all,” but rather “an implementation strategy of the Green Deal.”

In his view, the Commission should collect a list of “practical roadblocks” companies run into when they want to invest in green technologies, to “come to an overview of how they can better integrate the different policies and laws, and/or remove these obstacles.”

“The omnibus is not a tool to change the targets set in laws. It’s not there to change the policy,” he said.

“But if you want to implement the Green Deal in the little time left, you need to make sure that regulations are lean and coherent […], and that these roadblocks, that you cannot all predict are taken out,” said Mensink.

The Antwerp paper had warned that, to enact a legislation that would effectively boost investment incentives in clean technologies – legislators needed to avoid “that the Green Deal policy targets are followed by prescriptive and detailed implementing regulations.”

Competitiveness concerns

The meeting also comes at a time when European businesses are ramping up warnings about an industrial downturn, as Europe has grown much slower than global competitors over the last few years – a lag businesses blame on high energy prices and, according to BusinessEurope, a “tsunami” of new laws they say have been adopted in Brussels over the current legislative cycle.

In a joint paper on reducing red tape presented by the German and French economy ministries in October, the two countries had laid the groundwork for a wider push to the bloc’s competitiveness.

Notably, the document emphasised they did not intend to lower the bloc’s “political ambition and related standards,” but instead focused on cutting regulatory burdens and hurdles for businesses.

“However, we must dismantle any rule where the inhibiting effect outweighs the social benefit,” it said 

The paper also urged the Commission to set out an “ambitious Bureaucracy Reduction Action Plan” that should allow member states to take the lead on cutting red tape.

In March last year and later in her September State of the Union speech, Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen pledged to reduce reporting obligations for companies by 25% – which was followed up by more detailed measures in the Commission’s 2024 work programme, published in October.

In it, the EU executive said it was putting forward measures to rationalise administrative requirements. For example, “consolidating overlapping obligations [and] reducing the number of businesses concerned.”

Among the legislative files that were seen to benefit from revisions and deadline deferrals, the Commission cited the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the Accounting Directive, and the Benchmark Regulation.

[Edited by Anna Brunetti/Rajnish Singh]

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