On 28th October 2015, the European Commission, EC, published the new Single Market Strategy, which has defined a number of ambitious and pragmatic actions focused on three main areas: creating additional opportunities for consumers, professionals and businesses; encouraging the modernisation and innovation that Europe needs; ensuring practical benefits for people in their daily lives.
The Strategy will have an impact on the CECE industry in the following fields.
The EC will address the access of small companies and start-ups to funding, and study how to boost their growth.
In addition to providing EU funding instruments, the Commission is improving companies access to private finance through the investment Plan and the Capital Markets Union.
In this context, the Commission will bring forward proposals to create a European venture capital fund-of-funds, supported by the EU budget and open to others in order to attract private capital.
It will also simplify VAT requirements, reduce the cost of company registration and put forward a proposal on insolvency.
The Commission will provide guidance on how existing law, including the Services Directive, the E-Commerce Directive and consumer law such as the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the Unfair Contract Terms Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive, applies to the so-called collaborative economy.
It will also assess whether there are regulatory gaps and how they need to be addressed without favouring one business model over another.
Hence, in 2016 the EC will publish a European agenda for the collaborative economy, including guidance on how EU law applies to collaborative economy business models and an assessment of possible regulatory gaps.
To facilitate the provision of services across member state borders, and to create a real single market for services and skilled professionals (engineering services and construction), the Commission will introduce a services passport and support Member States in their efforts to modernise regulated professions.
It will propose legislative action to address regulatory barriers, such as diverging legal form and shareholding requirements, as well as multidisciplinary restrictions for key business services and, if appropriate, organisational requirements in construction companies.
The Commission will review market developments and, if necessary, take action in connection with insurance requirements for business and construction service providers.
Then, the Commission will take action to ensure that consumers seeking to buy services or products in another Member State, be it online or in person, do not face diverging prices, sales conditions, or delivery options, unless this is justified by objective and verifiable reasons. In line with its geo-blocking initiative in the Digital Single Market Strategy and as part of a comprehensive approach to further increase fairness in the Single Market, the Commission will take measures – both legislative and enforcement actions – to fight unjustified different treatment of customers on the basis of residence or nationality.
The standardization system and its functioning will also be addressed.
The Commission will, by way of a Joint Initiative, modernise its existing standard-setting partnership in co-operation with the relevant interlocutors: industry, the European Standardisation Organisations, SMEs and all other interested parties.
Regarding the modernization and improvement of public procurement practices, the Commission will propose voluntary ex ante assessment mechanism of the public procurement aspects of certain large infrastructure projects and will launch Initiatives for better governance of public procurement through establishment of contract registers, improved data collection and a networking of review bodies.
In order to consolidate the IPR framework, the Commission will push through final steps to make the Unitary Patent a reality and clarify how it will interact with national patents and national supplementary protection certificates.
As already announced under the Digital Single Market Strategy, the Commission will review the enforcement of EU intellectual property rules. The aim is to deprive commercial-scale infringers of their revenue flows, rather than pursuing individuals for infringing IPRs.
When it comes to strengthening the single market and establishing the culture of compliance (market surveillance of products), the Commission wishes to issue a proposal for market information tools allowing the Commission to collect information from selected market players; a legislative proposal to improve the existing notification procedure under Directive 2015/1535 for services and an action plan to increase awareness of the mutual recognition principle.
Later on the EC will also define a comprehensive set of actions to further enhance efforts to keep non-compliant products from the EU market (including a possible legislative initiative). The E-compliance initiative will be pursued and possibly proposed as a piece of legislation. The new regulation on market surveillance is at the moment not withdrawn, but there is no clear statement on the future of this pending piece of legislation.
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