The Minister of Development and Technology, Krzysztof Hetman, has appointed Mariusz Filipek as the authority for deregulation and economic dialogue. According to the Minister’s orders, the official duties will include proposing legislative actions to improve the conditions for carrying out economic activities and support in deregulation actions in the area of business law. The Business Centre Club experts pointed out key areas where deregulation is necessary.
“Deregulation, as a kind of system’s perfection, should arise from the legislator’s drive to optimize a possibly stable system, not one that is constantly changing. The results should have a universal character. It is a truism to state that all changes in law should be thought out. Experience shows that this requirement remains unfulfilled,” says Marcin Nosiński, a BCC expert in construction.
“The deregulation process must be considered on two levels: general, which expresses basic principles related to the deregulation of business law in general, and detailed – identifying specific problematic areas and offering solutions,” adds the expert.
BCC believes that deregulation must not be a principle to be implemented at any cost, and in essence increasing only the number of rapidly procedural legal modifications, nor serve for the removal of individual problems. In recent years, too little attention has been paid to fundamental principles that would guarantee high-quality law.
Radośław Płonka, a BCC expert in business law believes that one of the most important issues for every entrepreneur, regardless of the industry, is a thorough, systemic reform of the judiciary.
Such reform should not only limit defendant’s rights and impose a number of obligations and restrictions on them (e.g., the need to obtain court permission to submit another letter in a case), but also bring the judiciary closer to citizens and entrepreneurs. Judgments based on formal issues are not fair and unfortunately often occur. In such cases, cases are ended quickly, which improves the statistics of case recognition time, but it’s not good for entrepreneurs. It takes a long time to conduct proceedings and to perform individual actions by the courts, despite the introduction of online debates and service through the court IT portal for attorneys.
“You wait the longest for a verdict in business courts. A simple case for payment of invoices lasts even 2-3 years,” emphasizes the expert.
“From my practice it follows that this is in principle a standard. The consequences of this situation are very unfavourable for entrepreneurs, for example when an entrepreneur has performed work, and the person who ordered it questions the quality of the work and for years does not pay the remuneration, despite actually benefiting from it. Everything is legal – there is no valid judgment that would force him to pay and state the lack of his position’s basis,” adds Płonka.
Nosiński points out that the demands set out in these applicable regulations, undermining the actors of the investment process in circumstances when they are not justified or necessary for the protection of specific value, such as construction safety, building objects, or planning, constitute an unnecessary legal barrier that should be reasonably eliminated from the legal system.
“We can raise legislative standards now,” says Nosiński. “We should take into account the introduction of principles that changes in the scope of preparations for investment should enjoy the vacatio legis, the length of which should be related to the average investment period. In other words, don’t change the rules of the game during the game.”
Nosiński believes that there should be one change per year instead of several. The vacatio legis period for planning, construction, technical conditions, should be 18 months or more.
“In my opinion, minor changes (of which there are many each year) should be introduced along with the draft amendments to the current regulations,” says Nosiński.
Jan Pilewski, a BCC expert on telecommunications, suggests the deletion of article 33, paragraph 2, point 9 in the Building Law of 7th July 1994, because it is considered redundant in the current legal state. Pilewski stresses that the nature of the amendments at the time of the introduction was pro-investment.
The BCC experts noticed the deregulations requested by the national manufacturers of drugs e.g. limitations of the information reported to the Integrated Monitoring System for Medicinal Products Traffic. Companies responsible for providing medicines cannot predict the specific branch of the wholesaler where sales will be realised and it is independent of these companies. The National eHealth Centre (the body responsible for eHealth solutions in Poland) should also remove barriers for sharing the summary of product characteristics, which does not contain any overtly promotional content.
