Single Market Forum 2016/2017 stakeholder conference – What can a Services Passport achieve?

This stakeholder conference aims to help the European Commission gather views and exchange ideas with stakeholders about the services passport initiative.

Beyond economic and legal assessments on the functioning of the Services Directive, the European Commission carried out several exercises over the past years to gather evidence on the remaining obstacles to a fully functioning Single Market for Services.

Nine stakeholder workshops were organised as part of the Single Market Forum 2014. These targeted small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are still facing difficulties providing or purchasing services across borders. In addition, the Single Market Forum 2015 allowed the Commission and stakeholders to delve deeper into these issues and agree on a call for action on the forthcoming developments of the Single Market, in particular for services.

Following these valuable exercises, the Commission wishes to focus the debate on a specific initiative which was announced in the Single Market Strategy: the services passport.

This initiative has been called for by the European Council in its "Conclusions of 28-29 June 2016", to make it easier for businesses in key areas to offer their services in another EU country.

In addition, a public consultation has been running on this initiative (from 3 May to 26 July 2016) which helps gather views from stakeholders, as well as first-hand experiences, on the remaining barriers to the cross-border provision of services in the EU.

With this conference, the Commission wishes to go a step further and exchange ideas with stakeholders on the various policy options that could be envisaged to address the difficulties identified:

• the possibilities to simplify administrative requirements that service providers have to comply with when they want to start the cross-border provision of services;.
• the opportunity and means to address obstacles of a regulatory nature, to facilitate the access of service providers to another EU country's market;.
• the solutions to ensure the better integration of insurance requirements for service providers across the EU.

More detailed information will be added soon.