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State Aid Reviews and Consultations

Commission Road Map for State Aid reform 2005-2010 – State Aid Action Plan

In June 2005 the European Commission published their proposals on State aid reform in the form of a set of “Road Map” proposals. The Commission’s proposals can be found here.

The Commission’s Roadmap communication sets out the Commission’s aims to:

• Encourage less distortive and better targeted aid
• Introduce a more refined economic approach to assessing and approving aid
• Make the regime more streamlined, efficient, transparent and predictable, and make enforcement more effective
• Encourage member states to take a greater share of the responsibility for effective state aids

The Commission adopted new Regional Aid Guidelines in December 2005 and new risk capital, de minimis aid and R&D and Innovation instruments in 2006. The New Environmental Aid Guidelines were agreed in January 2008 and will come into force in the spring.

Ongoing and future reviews include:

• The General Block Exemption Regulation
• The Rescue and Restructuring Guidelines
• Procedural Rules

See DG Competition website for its reform proposals.

The UK broadly welcomes this review. State aid rules form a key part of the European competition regime and it is very important that they operate effectively, both as a whole and at the level of individual guidelines which set the detailed terms under which member states can subsidise businesses for purposes such as research, environmental protection, the provision of core infrastructure and services, and the promotion of SMEs and entrepreneurship.

Where applicable the UK responses are shown on the right hand menu.