Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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19. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the measures that will reduce the regulatory burden for small businesses, given recent surveys on red tape for small business; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [41756/15]

Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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The recent World Bank's Doing Business Report 2016 provides an assessment of a range of regulations affecting SMEs throughout their life cycle. In this Report Ireland is ranked 17^th for Ease of Doing Business, out of 189 countries. This places Ireland 4^thin the Euro area and 7^thin the EU. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2015 ranks Ireland 16^th, up from 24^thin 2011. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report ranks Ireland 24^th, up from 29^thin 2011.Good regulation provides a stable base for economic activity and a level playing field for business, while also protecting workers, consumers and the environment. The goal of Better Regulation Policy is to ensure that the processes for generating new regulation, and for evaluating existing regulation, are as effective and efficient as possible. Regulation should achieve the policy goals underpinning it in the least costly manner possible, without undermining the protections that regulation provides.

To this end, my Department has worked for several years to identify administrative burdens on business and to reduce them wherever possible. A project driven by my Department, and completed in 2012, identified administrative costs faced by business arising from regulation across Government. My Department, the CSO, Revenue and the Department of Transport all met or exceeded the 25% reduction target that was set, and a reduction of more than 20% was achieved across Departments reducing the cost of administrative burdens for business by almost €320 million annually.

The High Level Group on Business Regulation, currently chaired by my colleague, Ged Nash, T.D., the Minister for Business and Employment, and its predecessor, the Business Regulation Forum, have worked directly with business and union representatives to identify the most important regulatory burdens faced by business and to find solutions, simplifications and clarifications from the relevant Departments, Offices and Agencies.

Other measures taken by my Department include:

- Reducing the time taken by businesses to find out about the regulations that affect them by developing the businessregulation.ie portal, accessible from the front page of my Department’s website, under the heading Making it Easier for Business;

- Running seven Taking Care of Business events, where up to thirty public bodies come together for a free half-day event to provide information and advice to more than 2,000 business people to date;

- Developing an Integrated Licencing Application Portal to help reduce the regulatory burden on the enterprise sector through the provision of a single portal for applying for, and renewing, a multiplicity of licences;

- Consolidating 17 Companies Acts into one in 2014, making it easier to operate a company in Ireland, reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and making company law obligations easier to understand; and

- The Workplace Relations Reform Programme, has led to the establishment of the Workplace Relations Commission to deliver a world-class workplace relations service and employment rights framework by merging the activities of several existing Bodies of First Instance and all existing appellate functions into an expanded Labour Court.