EPP4Growth: Open letter to European Commission President.

The Chairman of the EPP Group, Joseph Daul, has sent a letter to the European Commission President calling for the Commission to simplify and unblock existing barriers to the optimisation of the EU internal market. As well as urging the Commission to improve implementation and enforcement of the Single Market, the EPP Group calls for determined and concerted action in three further areas to help the EU grow out of the crisis: stimulation of growth and job creation for SMEs, cutting red tape to free entrepreneurs from unnecessary bureaucracy and structural reforms for growth and employment in all Member States.

Joseph Daul is convinced that:”to carry our economies forward we have to make our growth strategies more concrete and more credible - which means binding. My Group believes that the Euro Plus Pact and the Europe 2020 Strategy are the right roadmaps, but they will only be successful if their targets are binding. We need to 'lock in' Member States and seek a more binding mechanism to ensure that they really live up to commitments made. The single market acquis is strong - its implementation unsatisfactory. To tap this unused potential the Commission has to be more determined in enforcing the transposition of law in Member States.”

The Chairman of the EPP Group proposes to focus immediately on some important single market directives to be transposed more quickly, as for example the late payment directive and the consumer rights directive, and that in these areas we focus on an identical transposition in all Member States. In his views: ”this will deliver direct benefits to EU SMEs, the business community and European citizens.”

“We need real single market governance; this means that we need a strong Commission which will enforce the law. We are ready to support, as a concrete proposal, a 'fast track infringement procedure'. We may want to consider establishing an 'internal market prosecutor' who could prepare infringement procedures independently and submit these to the College of Commissioners for adoption,” writes Joseph Daul.

“As the largest political Group in the European Parliament we are, and always were, ready to deliver on single market legislation within an ambitious timetable we can mutually agree on. Today, we must better demonstrate to our citizens that the Single Market is not only Europe’s great success story, but that it exists to serve them. That only through a well-functioning Single Market will we create the environment for long-term investment in infrastructure, new technology and in the creation of jobs which will provide sustainable growth,” underlined Joseph Daul.