On Wednesday 20 January, the European Parliament adopted, by a large majority (462 votes in favour, 120 against and 108 abstentions), the report brought by Danish liberal Morten Løkkegaard to strengthen the single market, particularly the free movement of services.
As the unfortunate rapporteur of the text on the e-card for services during the previous mandate (see EUROPE 11986/16), the Dane insisted on this occasion on the potential of services to revive the European economy after the health crisis and on the importance of completing the single market for services in order to do so. “The potential is enormous: 297 billion euros! It does not require new legislation or new aid packages”, Løkkegaard said on Twitter.
In particular, MEPs regret the uneven implementation of existing rules and, in order to remedy this, they call on the European Commission to react more quickly and above all more often in the event of national rules not complying with European provisions.
Next, the Commission is to establish a scoreboard that assesses how good or bad a Member State is at implementing EU Single Market rules, singing the praises of publicly naming and shaming bad performers among Member States.
For example, MEPs want to ensure compliance with the legislation in force, and to this end, they call on the Commission to improve the monitoring of the quality of national transpositions and request an annual report after an evaluation in conjunction with the social partners and the Member States. They urge the Commission and the Member States to define the structure and modus operandi of the new Single Market Enforcement Task Force (SMET) (see EUROPE 12566/10).
In this context, they support the European Commission’s initiative to update the Single Market Scoreboard by introducing a series of indicators to better take into account the implementation of European rules. In this respect, they encourage the Commission to make use of the data in the framework of the Internal Market Information System (IMI), the Internal Market Problem Solving Network (SOLVIT), and the European Commission’s CHAP Central Complaints Registry.
In general, they consider that the promotion of information on European and national rules needs to be improved, particularly through the single digital gateway.
The text was massively rejected by The Left and Identity and Democracy. The Greens/EFA abstained. On the left, criticisms have been levelled at the lack of attention paid to the social question and social dumping potentially linked to the free movement of services (see EUROPE 12639/12). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)