Member States have never performed better in writing agreed Internal Market rules into national law on time, but still need to improve the way those rules are applied in practice, according to the European Commission’s latest Internal Market Scoreboard.

On average 0.7% of Internal Market Directives for which the implementation deadline has passed are not currently written into national law, down from 1.0% in July 2009. This means that Member States are well below the 1.0% target agreed by Heads of State, which was to be achieved by 2009 at the latest. Twenty Member States are either at or below the target, while Lithuania and Malta were overall the best performers, being three Directives away from a perfect score. This is the third time that Malta has been in first position.

Sixteen Member States achieved their best result so far. However, seven Member States – Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Greece – are still above the target and hindering further reduction of the deficit. As regards application of EU law, there has been a slight reduction in the number of infringement cases, but the duration of the proceedings remains too long and Member States take on average 18 months to comply with Court of Justice rulings despite the legal obligation to take immediate action.

Implementation of Internal Market Directives

• At 0.7%, the average transposition deficit – the percentage of Internal Market Directives that have not been implemented into national law in time – of the 27 Member States is well below the interim target of 1% agreed by the Heads of State and Government in 2007. This is the first time that Member States have outperformed their target within the deadline agreed upon.
• In total, 16 Member States achieved or equalled their best result ever: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Spain, France, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Finland and the United Kingdom.
• The number of Member States achieving the target went up from 18 to 20. The Member States still not in line with the 1% target are the following: Austria, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, Luxembourg and Greece. This being said, with the exception of Austria, all 7 Member States managed to considerably reduce their deficits.
• Given the volume of legislation that will come on stream in the next 6 months, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg and Poland will all need to take drastic action to reach the target next time round.
• Member States have managed to decrease the number of long-overdue directives from 22 to 16 within the last six months.
• Member States have also managed to reduce the number of directives not correctly transposed. Adding the number of directives not correctly transposed to the number of directives not transposed in time results in an EU average deficit of 1.5% compared to 1.8% half a year ago.
• Member States should now put an increased focus on the need to reduce transposition delays. Today, on average Member States take an extra 9 months to transpose directives after the transposition deadline expires. Greece and Luxembourg are the worst offenders in this respect.

Infringements

• The overall number of infringement proceedings has decreased slightly by 1.2% compared to half a year ago. As in previous years, the areas of "taxation and custom union" and "environment" remain the biggest sources of infringements.
• Italy accounts for most of the open infringement proceedings, followed by Greece and Spain.
• The average time needed to resolve infringements has risen. Compared to December 2007 the time needed has increased from 25 months to 28 for the EU-15 and from 12 months to 16 for the EU-12.
• Member States take considerable time – on average almost 18 months – to comply with rulings of the Court of Justice, even though they are required to take immediate action. Austria and Spain account for the longest delay, taking on average approximately 25 months to comply with rulings.

The full text of the latest Internal Market Scoreboard is available at the Internal market website of the European Commision.