In a first report published on Tuesday 21 October and covering the first seven months of 2025, the European Commission details all the initiatives taken to simplify existing or future European rules. In particular, it presents the ‘omnibus’ simplification texts and their state of progress, the new tools put in place to apply existing legislation more easily, and the steps taken to ensure that Member States comply with the rules.
The Commission is promoting its methods for preparing new legislation, in particular through dialogue with industry, SMEs, social partners and the authorities affected. As a result, 28 dialogues involving more than 550 stakeholders have taken place since the start of the Commission’s mandate.
In the same vein, workshops with affected parties (‘reality checks’) have been held regularly (over 40 workshops) to identify problems in the transposition of rules, for example.
“We estimate annual admin savings from omnibus proposals and other simplification initiatives already presented at over €8.6 billion. This represents one fifth of our overall target in annual costs savings we want to achieve by the end of this mandate”, said the European Commissioner for Simplification, Valdis Dombrovskis.
Infringements. A large part of the report concerns the implementation of the rules and compliance with them in the Member States. The Commission publicises the various initiatives it has put in place to help capital cities transpose the rules: standardised models for transposing directives and an exchange and cooperation programme for public administration.
In order to avoid infringement proceedings as far as possible, the Commission indicates that it will be conducting more frequent informal dialogues with Member States when problems of non-compliance arise. The problem resolution rate is 67%, out of 168 dialogues launched over the first seven months of the year.
When these exchanges do not bear fruit, the Commission says it has no hesitation in launching infringement proceedings. Since the beginning of the year, 345 infringement cases have been closed after Member States were brought into compliance, according to the report.
See the annual report: https://aeur.eu/f/j28 (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)