Answer given by Mr Breton on behalf of the European Commission
30.8.2022
The single market is one of the EU’s greatest achievements, allowing EU citizens to enjoy a wider choice of services and products and better job opportunities.
It is a joint responsibility of Member States and the Commission, as guardian of the Treaty, to ensure that single market rules are complied with and that citizens’ rights are enforced, by preventing the creation of new barriers and ensuring the correct transposition and application of EC law[1].
In the last three years (15 June 2019 — 1 August 2022), the Commission has received 1156 complaints in the single market area[2]. Most of them come from organisations and are about barriers to the free movement of goods, to the free movement of services or the freedom of establishment of service operators resulting from laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States.
The main sectors concerned by these complaints are services and professions as well as public procurements.
All complaints were examined. The large majority were closed (either because unfounded or to be treated at national level, in line with the communication ‘Better Results through Better Application’ of 2016[3]) or were addressed via informal mechanisms such as Solvit[4].
Other were the subject of the opening of infringements proceedings by the Commission, by sending a letter of formal notice to the interested Member States, or were handled in EU-Pilot, the tool of administrative cooperation used to correct breaches at an early stage and to avoid opening infringement proceeding[5].
- [1] See Communication form the Commission ‘Long term action plan for better implementation and enforcement of single market rules’ (COM(2020) 94 final).
- [2] The given figures concern all the complaints registered in the Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs.
- [3] Communication from the Commission — EC law: Better results through better application, C/2016/8600, OJ C 18, 19.1.2017, p. 10‐20.
- [4] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32013H0461&from=EN
- [5] The EU Pilot project was introduced by the Commission with a number of volunteer Member States in 2008 with the aim of improving the cooperation between Member States and the Commission on issues concerning the conformity of national law with EC law or the correct application of EC law. As a general rule, EU Pilot is used as a first step to try to clarify or resolve problems, so that, if possible, formal infringement proceedings can be avoided. The informal dialogue with the Member State may either lead to the resolution of the issue at stake or help the Commission to identify more clearly potential breaches of EC law requiring the launch of a formal infringement procedure. Information on EU Pilot complements data on infringements as regards investigations launched by the Commission into potential non-compliance with EC law‐ within and beyond single market legislation and is released on annual basis in the Single Market Scoreboard ( https://single-market-scoreboard.ec.europa.eu/governance-tools/eu-pilot_en#more-information ).