Due to the presence of Covid, the production of legislation has exploded: between circulars, ordinances, decrees, Dpcm, laws, guidelines on safety in the workplace, etc., 450 legislative measures have been approved at national level in just under a year. A boom in the legislative bureaucracy that has disoriented the country.
The CGIA study office - which drafted this elaboration - however wishes to clarify that the Government faq and anti-Covid regulatory measures are not included among the 450 rules counted, which, again in this period, were also approved by the Regions and by local authorities.
A flood of provisions, we said, made up of thousands and thousands of pages that overwhelmed everyone: citizens, workers and businesses, creating many problems of interpretation, especially for small entrepreneurs who are still unraveling themselves among a tangle of laws, often in contradiction between them and constantly changing, because they are largely related to the "color" of their region.
The most prolific Public Administration (PA) in regulatory matters was the Ministry of Health with 170 measures. Followed by the Civil Protection with 86, the Ministry of the Interior with 37, the INPS with 36, the Commissioner for the emergency from Covid with 35 and Inail with 8.
The 29 decree laws approved by the Government up to now, the 23 Dpcm signed by the Prime Minister and the 14 laws approved by the Parliament have forced these administrations to deliberate in such abundant measure. Mind you, the gravity of the situation has forced the legislator to implement important measures to protect health, urgent provisions to deal with health risks and interventions to favor work and businesses: legitimate choices which, however, have unforeseeable Legislative "productivity" of the public bureaucratic machine.
The social partners were also called upon to draft a general protocol in agreement with the Government to protect health and safety in the workplace. The signature was reached on March 14 last. Following this provision, another 11 guidelines followed which involved as many production sectors.
However, it should be emphasized that in our country there has always been a great propensity to issue laws. It is estimated that in Italy there are 160.000 regulations, of which 71.000 are promulgated centrally and the remainder at regional and local level. In France, however, there are 7.000, in Germany 5.500 and in the United Kingdom 3.000.
However, the responsibility for this hyper-legislation is attributable to the failure to repeal competing laws and to the fact that our regulatory framework in recent decades has seen an exponential increase in the use of legislative decrees which, in order to be operational, require the approval of numerous implementing decrees. . This procedure has dramatically increased the production of legislation in our country, throwing citizens and businesses into despair, who are called to respect it every day.
A cross-section, the one photographed by the CGIA Studies Office, which makes you shiver. However, a solution would seem feasible. For example, it could be possible to reduce the number of laws by repealing the older ones, thus avoiding the legislative overlap that on many matters has generated incommunicability, lack of transparency, uncertainty of timing and increasingly onerous obligations, making bureaucracy an invisible and difficult to overcome enemy.
From the CGIA they conclude with a provocation: if the virus were allergic to the regulations produced by our bureaucracy, it would most likely have disappeared for some time, instead both the health and economic crises do not seem to diminish.
Mind you, the gravity of the situation has forced the legislator to implement all the legislative measures necessary to protect health and to cope with the difficulties of families and businesses.
This completely unforeseen context has recklessly unleashed the legislative hyper-productivity of the state bureaucratic machine that has thrown millions and millions of people into total confusion. Our Public Administration behaved in a two-faced manner: it was inflexible when it imposed restrictions on mobility and closures on bars, restaurants and shops; on the other hand, it proved to be completely inefficient and frighteningly unprepared when, instead, it was called upon to reorganize its services to "attack" the spread of the virus. There are plenty of cases to list: such as, for example, the traceability of the infected, see the sensational flop of the Immuni app, the failure to strengthen territorial medicine, the failed attempt to return everyone to school and the inability to put a serious plan to revive local public transport has been finalized.
