Policies for administrative and regulatory burden reduction are gaining momentum within national as well as regional political agendas. This appears to be happening also in Umbria Region, where, in order to enforce provisions for administrative simplification and red tape reduction contained in Regional Law no. 8/2011, on 21st January the Regional Government has adopted Regional Law no. 1/2015, “Testo unico Governo del territorio e materie correlate” (Urban Planning Single Act). The Act, on the one hand, aims to codify and organise all the existing norms and collect them under a single norm, thus contributing to normative simplification and transparency. On the other hand, most notably, it introduces the so called “one in, one out” rule (art. 2,5), according to which the regional government and the local municipalities, while adopting further territorial regulation, ought not to introduce any further regulatory burden unless they repeal or cancel some already existing regulation, so that the total amount does not increase. The “one in, one out” rule, which recalls the one introduced some years ago by the UK Government, and which has now turned into a “one in, two out” option, aims to monitor the regulatory flux and to avoid further red tape coming from new regulation, thus integrating the simplification toolkit that so far has mainly been employed to simplify the regulatory stock.
The Single Act’s full text is available (in Italian only) here.
(Federica Cacciatore)