Greetings from Strasbourg! In this video, I recap a few points I made at a hearing of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 23rd April) organised by the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact. At the hearing, I suggested we should give greater scope for local actors to experiment with different solutions to housing, healthcare etc. You can share this video by re-posting on substack and X. It is also available on Youtube.
I just participated in a hearing of the Special Committee on the New Democratic Pact at the Council of Europe, and one of the issues that I underlined in my contribution was that politicians are not there to solve all of our problems. In fact, we have unrealistic expectations of our politicians and our political system. We think that they are going to solve all these immensely complex problems - the pension system, the welfare system, immigration, public finances, etc., from a central pivot point.
I made the point that if we are going to actually develop sustainable solutions to these problems, we have to promote structured experimentation. That means allowing local actors to try out different solutions, to be empowered with real decision-making power and real financial power, so that they can try out different solutions to our ageing problem, our healthcare problem, our housing problem, etc.
And we also need to reduce the regulatory burden, the red tape that is imposed on civil society initiatives and on economic initiatives. We need to reduce the paperwork that people need to plough through in order to get any kind of project off the ground. In Europe, we have a major problem of overregulation. And by the way, that is a problem that really affects the housing sector as well.
That is one of the often invisible causes, for a lot of people, of the housing crisis: overregulation, not underregulation, because it is very difficult to actually construct housing and to get housing projects off the ground within a reasonable time period in many major cities.
The problem of overregulation and excessive bureacracy is widely recognised as a plague on European societies. Until we tackle these problems head-on, we will not be able to win back citizens who are losing their confidence and trust in the public institutions of Europe.
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