Germany has gotten used to “an expensive bureaucratic sluggishness” and has not made any progress in reducing bureaucracy for years.
(Photo: imago images / photothek)
Berlin Before the Ukraine war, reducing bureaucracy was high on the German government’s list of priorities. In their coalition agreement, the SPD, Greens and FDP promised: “We will reduce superfluous bureaucracy.”
Already in the course of the first half of the year there should be “presentable results”, it was said after the first closed meeting of the cabinet in January. Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) said he wanted “to get this country moving”.
Because of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, there has now been a silence about cutting bureaucracy and better legislation. Wolfgang Steiger, General Secretary of the Economic Council of the CDU, warns: “The current crisis must not prevent us from taking the necessary steps to reduce bureaucracy.”
On the contrary, it is now becoming particularly clear how much more efficient the state sector still has to become. Germany has gotten used to “an expensive bureaucratic sluggishness” and has not made any progress in reducing bureaucracy for years.
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The economist and former head of the monopolies commission Justus Haucap, together with Telefónica board member Valentina Daiber, has now written a position paper for the “Deregulation” think tank at the CDU economic council, which is available to the Handelsblatt. Tenor: The extent of regulation in Germany and the EU is constantly increasing. That means expensive and unnecessarily complex processes that increase legal uncertainty and act as an obstacle to innovation.
burden of bureaucracy
“Many entrepreneurs do not see the specific legal requirements as the primary burden, but rather the implementation regulations, administrative procedures, the forms and documents to be submitted and the analogous, complex and repetitive reporting, reporting and documentation obligations already mentioned,” the paper says .
And with the digitization of administration, for example, the interests of politics mixed with those of the authorities, i.e. the staff councils, data protection officers and those responsible for IT security.
The Economic Council of the CDU considers the constant evaluation of regulatory measures in the field of digitization to be necessary.
(Photo: dpa)
Steiger criticizes: “When it comes to infrastructure expansion and approval processes for company investments, loops have to be looped over and over again, which spoils the action for everyone involved.”
Haucap and Daiber present specific demands for “de-bureaucratization and smart regulation” in the age of digitization. In essence, it is about a renewal of the self-image of the administration. Funding would have to be made available for agile “touching things up” and experimenting.
The constant evaluation of regulatory measures in the area of digitization is also necessary. Here, help is to come from an expert council – a committee made up of entrepreneurs, experts from the National Regulatory Control Council (NKR), representatives of the Federal Audit Office (BRH) and the respective supreme federal authority that is responsible for digital policy. In the current legislative period, this would be the Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and Transport by Volker Wissing (FDP).
The expert council would carry out audits and stress tests in the authorities and, according to Steiger, “independent of day-to-day political business, make concrete recommendations and operational solutions to the federal government in a process that is as lean as possible.”
Acceleration of procedures and change of the approval law necessary
The position paper also calls for defining “priority areas of regulation” in order to ensure a “rapid start” for effective “smart regulation”. Concrete example: an acceleration package for approval procedures in the infrastructure sector.
Secretary General Steiger refers to the acceleration of planning and approval procedures for digital infrastructure that the federal government has set itself: “That’s all well and good. Specifically, we are also calling for a change in the approval law so that construction planning adjustments can be made during the ongoing process without a complete rewind of the process.” The repeated interpretation, objection and reply loops could be avoided in this way.
“Politicians always tell us: The economy complains across the board, but is not specific enough,” explains Steiger. “The results of the task force at the Economic Council invalidate such political excuses, because the proposals from science and business have become very concrete.”
In the paper, Haucap and Daiber criticize the fact that the traffic light coalition has shifted the NKR to the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Justice: The return to the “central coordination of the Federal Chancellery” is a key success factor for the success of reform proposals.
More: The federal government continues to wrestle with digitization for competencies