Gold Magazine November - December 2013, Issue 32 | Page 86

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bureaucracy

EU

{BUSINESS}

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The Report from the UK’s Business Taskforce

I

n June, UK Prime Minister David Cameron tasked a group of six business leaders
to make a range of proposals to ensure that the EU single market makes it easy for
businesses in Europe to trade across borders, and to ensure that the EU regulatory
framework is competitive in the global market.
The Foreword and Executive Summary of the report, signed by Marc Bolland (Marks
& Spencer), Ian Cheshire (Kingfisher), Glenn Cooper (ATG Access), Louise Makin
(BTG), Dale Murray, CBE (Entrepreneur and Angel Investor) and Paul Walsh (Diageo),
are as follows:

Forewordproduce superb
Firms face a challenge. They

products, offer world-class services and
benefit from being able to sell to a European
market of 500 million customers. But they
are often encumbered by problematic, poorlyunderstood and burdensome European rules.
The impact is clear: fewer inventions are
patented, fewer sales are made, fewer goods
are produced and fewer jobs are created.
The burden also falls heaviest on small and
medium-sized firms who make up the vast
majority of businesses.
This would be bad enough if the w orld was
standing still – but it isn’t. The global economy
is being re-shaped at breakneck speed. In the
past decades, political systems have changed,
new players have emerged on the markets,
as well as new materials, new technologies
and workers who are better skilled than ever.
To compete in this fast-changing economy
requires regulation that promotes growth,
better access to markets and the availability of
new sources of energy.
When US companies can get new products
licensed and to market in days, it should not

take weeks or months in Europe. When small
and medium-sized enterprises are crucial to
creating new jobs, it doesn’t make sense for
the EU to extract £300 million from UK businesses alone to implement new data protection
rules. When innovation is so important for
future businesses, it is self-defeating that new
EU regulations have accompanied a 25% drop
in biomedical research, and that complex and
diverse rules on sales, promotions, labelling
and web content hamper e-commerce. And
when the discovery of shale gas in the United
States has led to that country’s industrial
renaissance, Europe must help its chemical,
plastics and steel industries, now paying
several times more for gas than their US
rivals, get the same benefits.
As businesspeople, we are convinced that
these and many other problems must be addressed if British and European firms are to
compete in the global marketplace. We need
regulation to operate in a pan-European market. We are not against regulation per se. But
we need regulation that is pro-growth and
pro-innovation.
To help sweep away barriers to growth, we
were asked by Prime Minister David Cam-

eron to develop a set of recommendations for
reform for the British and European governments as well as the EU institutions. And we,
in turn, asked British and European businesses
what they thought. With input from hundreds
of firms, individuals and business associations
across Europe we have developed 30 priority
recommendations to address five kinds of barriers:

• Barriers to overall competitiveness
• Barriers to starting a company and employ-

ing staff
• Barriers to expanding a business
• Barriers to trading across borders
• Barriers to innovation.

If these are implemented, billions of pounds,
euros, zloty and kroner could be saved, while
thousands of new firms and new jobs could be
created:
• In the digital economy alone, estimates suggest that reforms could add 4% to Europe’s
GDP;
• Removal of all outstanding EU barriers to
trade in services could lead to an additional
gain to the EU economy of 1.8% of EU GDP;

86 Gold THE INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT, FINANCE & PROFESSIONAL SERVICES MAGAZINE OF CYPRUS

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