Entrepreneurs: ‘The Netherlands will be poorer without Europe, but regulatory pressure is high’

Eighty percent of SME entrepreneurs find both the Dutch and European regulatory burden too great, according to a survey by MKB-Nederland and employers’ club VNO-NCW. “The regulatory burden has increased enormously over the past five years,” says chairman Jacco Vonhof of MKB-Nederland. According to Vonhof, the problem mainly lies in the guidelines, he argues for fewer and better rules.

Vonhof is not so much bothered by the regulations that apply to all member states, but mainly by the directives and how they are implemented nationally. ‘On the one hand, there is already a lot of regulatory pressure from Europe and on top of that there is also the interpretation of Dutch politics, which makes it incredibly complicated and also a very uneven playing field. Entrepreneurs suffer a lot from this.’

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Bureaucracy

Vonhof points out the problems that entrepreneurs encounter when they want to put a product on the European market: they need approval from 27 national supervisors for each individual product. ‘If you want to sell a can of paint, you have to make 27 different labels because everything has to say different things on it. That has to change.’

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Vonhof sees this uneven playing field everywhere, for example in energy policy. While the Netherlands sees gas as a fossil fuel that is heavily taxed, neighboring Germany includes it among green fuels and subsidizes it. ‘Yes, of course entrepreneurs can’t do anything with that.’

European-minded

According to Vonhof, a majority of the 1,600 respondents surveyed consider Europe ‘very important’ and will also vote in the European elections. ‘Entrepreneurs are very pro-European and I assume that the four forming parties will also come to the conclusion that the Netherlands without Europe would be a poorer country and that Dutch entrepreneurs would have to make much more effort to do business in Europe.’

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Fewer rules, better rules, is how Vonhof summarizes the mood among entrepreneurs. ‘If you sell cigarettes and petrol at the border in the Netherlands, it cannot be that it is about half cheaper on the other side of the border. If they look at Europe in that way, these four parties will probably come to the conclusion that Europe is very important, but that things can be easier and better.’