Czech Business Today

The European Economic and Social Committee was asked by the European Commission to make an opinion on its Communication on Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme (REFIT) published recently COM(2014)368 final.

REFIT is one of the positive steps to react on many justified complaints of business but also general public about the Brussels attempts to regulate everything. As its name suggests, the aim of REFIT is to judge the regulatory fitness of existing legislation. It is linked to other programmes like Smart Regulation and Better Regulation but would need clearer distinction of their mutual hierarchy. 

The Committee prepared the draft of the opinion to be approved by the plenary session in December. The EESC expresses its support to the REFIT programme. Companies need the EU to ensure a level playing field and facilitate competitiveness and the public looks to the European level to protect their interests, particularly in regard to health and safety, the quality of the environment and the right to privacy. With proliferation of rules produced by European legislators in the past decades there is an urgent need to cut the red tape and constraints on small, medium-sized and micro enterprises and the public. The Commission should focus on quality rather than quantity and prioritise reductions of regulation representing the cost to businesses, a brake on their competitiveness and an obstacle to innovation and job creation. The EESC stressed in its proposal the need to improve the process of legislation be it through better functioning of impact assessment or more representative public consultation. It seems that preventive impact assessments on SMES and micro-enterprises are now given greater consideration than in the past, but the SME test should be applied more thoroughly and consistently. 

The EESC proposes that the Commission takes advantage of the resources of the representative consultative bodies of civil society organizations that already exist at the European, national and regional levels such as chambers of commerce, employers organizations, trade unions, consumer protection organizations instead of commissioning the different surveys and studies to private agencies who then collect the data from these organizations. The EESC also shares the Commission’s view that the need for legal certainty and predictability argue against quick fixes. It considers that any changes to the legislation must be carefully thought through and situated in a long-term perspective in order to ensure predictability, legal certainty and transparency. The entrepreneurs should follow-up very closely what benefits the REFIT programme can bring them in cutting of red tape. They should endeavour also to enforce similar programmes for the reduction of unnecessary regulation on national level. The Czech business representation is very active in this respect and finds positive response from the Government but there is still large scope for the improvement and removal of administrative barriers.

Ivan Voleš
Member of the Group of Employers EESC