State reform, why this time?

If the Government manages to achieve, say, 10% of what is in its Programme in terms of simplifying the relationship between companies and citizens and the State, including in this area of ​​Justice, we can indeed have a significant boost in economic growth. A contribution that may even be more significant than tax reductions, which, as we know, are far from deserving of consensus.

There are more and more examples, which would be comical if they did not represent investments that are not made, losses that are incurred, opportunities that are lost and jobs that are not created because of the bureaucratic web that has been created over the years. In addition to the bureaucratic vein of the European Union, we have our tendency to complicate matters, in some cases due to incompetence or negligence, and a myriad of entities that have to speak out but do not speak to each other.

We have already been promised many State reforms, and we have been promised not to even talk about them so that we can continue to do them without creating resistance from the services – a philosophy generally cherished by the Government of António Costa, who even hated the expression “structural reform”. Ironically, the Government that did the most in terms of administrative simplification was that of José Sócrates, with Maria Manuel Leitão Marques as Secretary of State for Administrative Modernisation.

The Troika , as the financial intervention was simply known, gave any expression related to state reform a very negative connotation. As he argued, António Costa did something discreetly and made a little more progress because of the RRP. For example, part of what is being done is related to the commitments made to access the RRP funds, such as the concentration of the Government, with mergers of general secretariats and which coincided with the partial move of the ministries to the CGD building on João XXI in Lisbon. And even tax simplification is a commitment to Brussels.

Luís Montenegro now has the courage to even create a Ministry for State Reform and announce “war on bureaucracy”. Making his objectives explicit is risky in itself, since he has already created an entire system of warnings in the public administration in general, as well as in trade unions, professional organizations and even political parties. Bureaucracy creates jobs and a web of interests that are very difficult to break.

Several of the measures announced, if taken, create conditions to significantly reduce our context costs, with benefits for companies, but also for citizens, even more than tax reductions.

One is to stop the bureaucracy-creating machine by promising to assess the “bureaucratic impact” before passing new legislative and regulatory measures, “with the possibility of rejection if the impact is negative.” It would be better to guarantee from the outset that it would be rejected if the cost outweighs the benefit.

Another area that promises to eliminate some of the bottlenecks in the implementation of public projects is, as can be read in the Government Program, “the reduction of bureaucracy and acceleration of licensing, authorization and public contracting regimes, eliminating excessive pronouncements and favoring a posteriori inspection, adopting tacit deferral whenever possible and penalizing unjustified rejections”.

Just what is written in that sentence, without going into anything else, is a herculean task that, if the Government manages to carry out, will lay the foundations of a genuine cultural revolution in the functioning of the State in the country. Of course, one of the questions is: how are unjustified rejections assessed? But if that is the only thing that falls through, we will already have gained something.

Given what it wants to do, the Government must prepare for resistance on all fronts, including from some private agents who make a living from consultancy to overcome bureaucracy. There is a lot of work and paperwork that will be unnecessary, which means that there is work – unnecessary, it is true – that will no longer be done. It will not be easy to convince employees, professional associations and even companies that make a living from bureaucracy.

There is, however, one reason why we can be moderately optimistic about the ability to implement these reforms. At the moment, bureaucracy is not only creating difficulties for companies and citizens, it is also increasingly blocking governance and the ability of governments to implement what they announce. Take, for example, what is happening with housing. This government, like previous governments, is struggling to ensure that public housing is built, and between the back and forth of paperwork, the progress is extremely slow.

In the search for maximum efficiency, it would be good if the Government could stop the bureaucracy machine and significantly reduce the number of opinions and prior authorizations. The greater the dispersion into a thousand and one objectives – as the Government's program seems to be – the greater the probability of losing the “war on bureaucracy”.