Single Market and Simplification: Turning Ambition Into Action

The Single Market is one of the EU’s most valuable assets. Despite its benefits for the European economy, the Single Market remains incomplete and is delivering well below its potential. With the European Commission’s recent Single Market Strategy and the Single Market Roadmap to 2028, Ibec calls on the Irish Presidency to turn those ambitions into action and remove barriers fragmenting the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital.

As part of Ibec’s campaign, Making a Resilient, Competitive EU a Reality, this paper sets out the priorities for Ireland’s upcoming EU Presidency. It outlines that the Presidency must capitalise on the momentum of the recent Letta and Draghi reports to urgently advance the Single Market, moving beyond high-level ambition to tangible action. In this publication, we set out clear lines of action for the Irish Presidency:

Key recommendations:

• Effective Single Market governance through greater harmonisation, coherent implementation and shared responsibility for enforcement.
• In the design of new legislation, ensure the Better Regulation principles are applied at every step of the process to ensure a stable, predictable and coherent legislative framework. For existing legislation, simplification and digitalisation can alleviate administrative burden.
• Existing tools should be revitalised and enforced properly to ensure uniform transposition of harmonised product legislation, which is the backbone of the free movement of goods.
• A sectoral approach to the liberalisation of services should complement, not replace, the implementation of the Services Directive and removal of barriers in the Single Market for labour.
• Building a Savings an Investment Union, simplifying access to European-level funds, and fair and competitive public procurement is key to unlock productivity, competitiveness and growth.