France ! Its landscapes, its wines, its cheeses, its luxury industries, its culture, its universalism…. and its bureaucratic maquis. Already in the 19th century, Emile de Girardin had grasped the problem: “It seems that bureaucracy in France has the sole function of doing nothing and preventing everything”*. Today, in this maze where enigmatic acronyms and abstruse standards proliferate, if you are not a “techno-administrative” polyglot, you are lost.
Citizens, entrepreneurs, employees (including civil servants), elected officials of course, sweat over this jargon. What a waste of time when it comes to creating, innovating, acting. In twenty years, the number of legislative and regulatory articles has increased from 215,200 to 331,848 in 2022 and our normative stock accounts for 45.5 million words, twice as many as in 2002! Who can still claim that “no one is supposed to ignore the Law”? This excess of bureaucracy slows down, brakes and discourages, sometimes to the point of preventing creative action, all the time, and increasingly so. It does not spare our public services, plagued by an administrative employment rate of 33%, against 25% in Germany or 24% in Sweden. It is not surprising that our hospital system is overwhelmed, that the effective rate of police officers present on the ground is only 37%, that the delays in obtaining a judgment at first instance are almost three times longer than the European average . Examples are legion which illustrate the continuous deterioration of public performance, not to mention the resulting legal uncertainty.
The mayors suffer on a daily basis from the piling up of laws, plans, master plans, contradictory injunctions. Normative inflation hinders and represents a cost for local authorities estimated for 2022 at 2.5 billion euros by the National Council for the Evaluation of Standards (CNEN). It is part of the public powerlessness that feeds the civic crisis. This administrative mountain, which Sisyphus would be condemned to climb eternally if only he could find the right form to obtain permission to push his rock, stands in front of each one of us.
A great simplifying turn
When it takes seventeen months on average to obtain permission to create a factory, it takes between four and six in Germany or Sweden. When you have to wait three months to get a passport or identity card, it only takes two to four weeks in Italy or Spain. Because every minute spent filling out a form is one less minute to act, because every euro spent managing paperwork is one less euro building the future (the OECD has quantified the cost of administrative complexity French at 3% of GDP), because each bureaucratic complication, including now digital, brings about a reduction in freedom, it is time to no longer confuse the methods and the purpose, to move from a logic of control to a logic of confidence, that the State sanctions the abuse a posteriori but stops restricting the use a priori.
We must ensure that normative sobriety becomes the rule by making decentralization and subsidiarity the two pillars of this major simplifying shift through responsibility. Transferring regulatory (and non-legislative) power to local authorities for implementing texts of laws voted by Parliament would allow flexibility and efficiency while respecting the unity of the Republic. Above all, it should not be left to the administration to reform itself. This doesn’t work and ultimately adds a layer of complication. We saw it with the “shock of simplification” wanted by François Hollande in 2013 for which the exceptions number in the thousands on more than a hundred pages. With the help of the CNEN, a simplification pilot, under the direct authority of the Prime Minister, should lead in five years to a 25% reduction in the administrative burdens weighing on companies, associations, local authorities and individuals.
Our administration must no longer consider the user as a number but as a citizen, the entrepreneur as a file but as a creator of value, and the elected official as a manager but as a decision-maker. What is at stake is not only France’s competitiveness, but also our quality of life and our freedoms.
David Lisnard, president of Nouvelle Energie and mayor of Cannes.
*On the genesis of bureaucracy and its deleterious effects today, read “La dictateur bureaucratique ou la ‘bureaucrature'” by Frédéric Masquelier, Hermann editions (2022)