European Commission - Statement Remarks by Commissioner Dombrovskis at the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs on simplification, implementation and enforcement Brussels, 24 March 2026 Thank you Chair, honourable Members. Good afternoon. It's good to return to this House for today's structured dialogue to provide a comprehensive overview of recent and upcoming developments on simplification, implementati...
European Commission - Statement Remarks by Commissioner Dombrovskis at the European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs on simplification, implementation and enforcement Brussels, 24 March 2026 Thank you Chair, honourable Members. Good afternoon. It's good to return to this House for today's structured dialogue to provide a comprehensive overview of recent and upcoming developments on simplification, implementation and enforcement. The Commission's efforts across these three areas must be viewed in a broader context. Europe's growth and productivity challenges have been building for some time now. This has obvious and serious implications for our capacity to safeguard our prosperity and achieve our strategic objectives. But the urgency of addressing these challenges has increased sharply in today's rapidly changing and increasingly challenging world. Simpler, clearer, and better-enforced rules are crucial pieces of the puzzle to improve Europe's competitiveness and realise our economy's full productive potential. I am very grateful for the continued high attention of the European Parliament to these priorities. Today's dialogue, together with the broader exchanges with this Committee, is an important contribution to achieving our objectives in this area. Last December, I presented the 2025 Overview Report on simplification, implementation and enforcement. This is a key element of the Commission's reinforced annual reporting to the European Parliament and the Council. I am pleased to return today to present how work has advanced since then. A simpler, lighter, and more coherent regulatory framework is not just about making rules more efficient. It is about reigniting the engine of Europe's competitiveness and securing our long-term prosperity. Together with deepening the Single Market, simplification, implementation, and enforcement are key priorities of this Commission's mandate. By removing regulatory bottlenecks and streamlining processes, the EU is enhancing the effectiveness of its policies. This helps to tackle the structural barriers holding back growth and to preserve our social market economy. Take innovation, for example. It needs to be at the heart of any strategy to drive growth, raise productivity and enhance our competitive advantages. A recent OECD report highlights how red tape is getting in the way. 3.9% of EU employees are engaged in compliance functions, compared with just 1.7% in research roles. Europe needs more people in laboratories and fewer people filling in forms. Simplification can help achieve that objective and more. Back in February last year, we set an ambitious target of a 25% cut in administrative burdens for businesses, and 35% for SMEs. This translates into €37.5 billion in yearly administrative savings by the end of this mandate. Since then, the Commission has proposed measures with the potential for €15 billion of recurring administrative savings, and €6 billion in one-off relief. These are real savings that contribute to boosting the competitiveness of EU economy. In the last year, the Commission tabled ten Omnibus proposals. These packages targeted: sustainability reporting and corporate due diligence, investments, agriculture and farmers, defence readiness, chemicals, small mid-caps, digital rules, environmental acquis, automotive, and food and feed safety. However, simplification is not just a one-off exercise. It is a recurring process to seek constant improvements to the quality of EU legislation. More than half of the legislative initiatives in the 2026 Commission Work Programme have a strong simplification focus. This means that they must deliver net administrative savings. In addition, the Work Programme foresees three simplification Omnibus packages: on energy products, taxation and reducing burdens for citizens. We want everyone to feel the benefits of simpler and more effective EU rules and call on Member States to do the same with national rules. At the same time, the Commission's services are screening legislation in their remit to identify outdated, redundant or inefficient rules. This is expected to lead to further proposals to simplify, codify, withdraw or repeal, and consolidate rules. The screening extends to delegated and implementing acts. That is how we proposed to deprioritise 30% of those planned for this year, after careful consideration. This represents an additional and significant burden reduction. All these actions share a common goal: creating a virtuous circle of less complex rules, clearer obligations and better implementation. By removing regulatory bottlenecks, we are accelerating the shift to a more innovative and dynamic economy. This is one which is better able to meet the challenges posed by today's rapid technological changes and rising geopolitical tensions. Simpler rules mean faster permits, quicker innovation, and more investment. And this is exactly what Europe needs to meet its ambitious economic, social and environmental objectives. Building on the good progress made so far, the Commission is preparing a dedicated Communication to reinforce its better regulation, simplification and enforcement practices. While these are different topics, they are brought together by the unity and clarity of purpose that I have just described. We are working, for instance, on new pathways to strengthen the analytical underpinning of legislative proposals, including through more systematic and more pertinent impact assessments. We are also considering options to boost better regulation across the policy cycle, including for urgent proposals or during legislative negotiations. The Communication will also contain an action plan on in-depth regulatory review and cleaning, based on the stress-tests, a targeted initiative to address gold-plating, and a set of actions to strengthen enforcement, as recently announced by the President. As you know, according to OECD assessments, the Commission has one of the most credible better regulation systems in the OECD. It is grounded in evidence, rigorous impact assessments, evaluations and extensive stakeholder engagement. But we are convinced that we can do even better and address the challenges that persist, including implementation and enforcement gaps, and unnecessary national over-regulation. The large expansion of the regulatory framework over recent decades also poses a major challenge in terms of ensuring the coherence and operational feasibility of legislation. The upcoming Communication will chart a path to gradually address these realities, in close cooperation with the co-legislators. Honourable Members, let me now focus on the topics of implementation and enforcement. For people and businesses to enjoy the benefits of our common rules and to have their rights protected, EU law must be applied fully and correctly across the EU. We must listen to those directly affected by the rules to identify possible obstacles to implementation and determine how best to support Member States in implementing EU law. To that end, we launched several new consultation tools last year, including the Implementation Dialogues. Up to today, all Members of the College have held 57 Implementation Dialogues, engaging with over 1,100 diverse stakeholders. These include industry representatives, SMEs, social partners, central, regional and local authorities, and civil society from all Member States. Earlier today, I held an Implementation Dialogue with European farmers' representatives and national statistical authorities on agricultural farm statistics. This was an insightful exchange on the implementation of the regulation on integrated farm statistics and identified possible simplification measures in the collection of data. Also today, Commissioners Serafin and Albuquerque are hosting their implementation dialogues focused on the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform and the European venture and growth capital funds respectively. So, we are committed to listening to stakeholders across all sectors and seriously considering their call for actions on faster implementation. These efforts do not stop there. Cooperation with Member States is the fastest way to improve implementation and address identified challenges. This is why the Commission is strengthening its implementation support. The aim is not only to ensure legal compliance, but to help meet targets, achieve objectives, and deliver on our policies. And we are already seeing concrete results. To support the implementation of EU laws, in April 2025 the Commission introduced a transposition roadmap IT tool to improve information flows between the Commission services and the Member States. These roadmaps are meant to help anticipate challenges in the transposition process. In less than a year, this new feature has been used by Commission services and a select group of volunteering Member States on the implementation of 35 directives. We are also following up lessons learned through Implementation Dialogues with other measures to support the better implementation of EU policies and funds. For example, following an implementation dialogue on VAT in the Digital Age, or ViDA, a technical assistance project was launched to provide support to 12 Member States with e-Invoicing and Digital Reporting Requirements. At the same time, when cooperation on the implementation of EU law fails, resolute enforcement becomes necessary. Over the past year, the Commission has launched 552 infringement procedures. We have pursued landmark cases to protect our Single Market, our fundamental rights, the rights of consumers and the primacy of EU law. The Commission also decided to refer 71 cases to the Court of Justice last year, concerning 21 different Member States. In 20 cases – all in which the Treaties provide for such recourse – the Commission accompanied the referral decisions with a request for financial sanctions. At the same time, the Commission closed 554 infringement procedures as Member States achieved compliance with EU law. This means 554 positive outcomes for our people and businesses. We also made an increasing use of pre-infringement dialogues with Member States. They are used when likely to lead to swifter solutions, and have proven very efficient, with a resolution rate of 76% in 2025. Having said all this, the Commission is also aware that there is still a rather large number of ongoing infringement cases, around 1,500. The non-application of EU law has consequences. For instance, unjustified barriers and fragmented implementation of Single Market rules undermine Europe's competitiveness. That is why, as I mentioned earlier, our upcoming Communication on better regulation and simplification will also consider enforcement. It will launch specific actions to level up the enforcement of the Single Market rulebook and strengthen enforcement across all policy areas. To conclude, honourable Members. I have presented our vision and strong commitment to simple and enforceable legislation. This implies a shift in how we approach our work, the attention we give to this task and how we allocate our resources. This task is not an easy one. It requires a shared commitment among all EU Institutions, in particular Parliament and Council as the co-legislators. We all stand to gain from embedding better regulation principles across the policy cycle – not only at the stage of preparing policy proposals but also during legislative process. That is why I hope to count on the cooperation of this Committee and this House to consider pragmatic ways to identify substantial amendments and assess their impacts during the legislative process. To this end, the Commission stands ready to increase the number and pertinence of its impact assessments. We ask the co-legislators to show an equal level of commitment to this principle in turn. At the same time, we are also asking of Member States that they tackle national overregulation that harms the Single Market. This so-called ‘gold-plating', where Member States impose stricter or extra rules, creates barriers, distorts competition, and ultimately reduces our shared prosperity. We plan to partner with Member States to discourage harmful overregulation. This includes through using new technologies to identify areas of friction and possible solutions and enhancing cooperation via existing forums such as the Single Market Enforcement Tool. People and businesses will not judge us by the number of rules that we adopt, but by whether those rules deliver tangible benefits in practice. This agenda also has wider and far-reaching consequences in terms of Europe's overall economic weight in the world. In a challenging world where size and strength matter more than ever before, a competitive and dynamic economy is essential for defending our values and interests. I look forward to hearing your views and hope to count on your support to make this wide-ranging and ambitious agenda a success. Thank you. STATEMENT/26/706
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