The EU needs to cut red tape

Opponents of the European Union often caricature it as a huge bureaucratic monster that eats up citizens' resources to feed an opaque and endogamous caste of civil servants. And although it is an unfair caricature that seeks to return power to the old nation states, it is true that the progressive deployment of European policies has also been accompanied by a sometimes inextricable bureaucratic forest that affects above all the primary sector and SMEs. That is why it is necessary to positively value the announcement by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, that she will launch a plan to reduce bureaucracy by between 25% (companies in general) and 35% (farmers and SMEs). The truth is that, in good faith and in keeping with the spirit of guarantees in matters of health or the environment that is the trademark of the EU, excessive bureaucracy or slowness in certain procedures has become a brake on economic activity and a factor that reduces the competitiveness of companies.

In reality, it is not so much about reducing controls as speeding up procedures by taking advantage of all the possibilities offered by technology and changing the approach so that it is the administration that verifies afterwards that everything has been done correctly and that you do not have to wait forever to start a business. The idea is the following: open doors and maximum facilities and confidence in those who want to start a business or ask for help, and also maximum severity if that person later breaks the regulations. In this, we must admit that Anglo-Saxon culture has a great advantage and is more efficient. Because in the end all this bureaucracy, for example when applying for European funds, ends up being a filter that excludes many SMEs from the start because they do not have the capacity or resources to fill out all the necessary paperwork. And that, in such an ultra-competitive world and in which Europe runs the risk of falling behind major competitors such as the United States and China, is a serious problem.

In Catalonia, too, the government of Salvador Illa has committed to reducing bureaucracy, just as it previously launched such successful initiatives as the one-stop shop for businesses, so this demand for de-bureaucratisation should be seen more as an opportunity to modernise and streamline administrative structures that, by their very nature, tend to become stagnant. It is very important, and even more so in the current context of the growth of the extreme right everywhere, that people see the administration as an ally and not as an obstacle, that their demands are met and that the money arrives, for example in the case of those affected by the DANA, with the speed and diligence that the situation demands. There are too many interests to dismantle the administration (see what is currently happening in the United States with Elon Musk) in order not to face what must be one of the great pending challenges: building a closer and more efficient administration.