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Video length: 3 min
Administrative simplification: does France have too many standards?
While excess standards are among the causes of discontent among farmers, certain senior officials and mayors make the same observation and deplore the complexity of administrative procedures. – (France 2)
While excess standards are among the causes of discontent among farmers, certain senior officials and mayors make the same observation and deplore the complexity of administrative procedures.
Is France crumbling under the weight of its administration? Jean-Pierre Jouyet, secretary general of the Élysée under François Hollande and minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, affirms this in his latest book. “It’s a collective mea culpa. I realized that I could not realize the difficulties of application linked to the inflation of standards, of laws”, he says. In Normandy, several mayors of small towns share this observation.
Disorientated mayors
“Both for individuals, who have the impression that it is the town halls that are blocking them, but also for the municipalities”, explains one of them. At the request of the prefect himself, Eric Herbet, mayor of Quincampoix (Seine-Maritime) had brought his town hall building up to standard, in particular to make it more accessible to disabled people. But one day, “I saw the environmental police arrive who asked me to stop my work because I was participating in the destruction of protected species”, he remembers. Eleven years ago, François Hollande already promised a “shock of simplification”.
