The simplification bill was finally passed in the Assemblée nationale on Tuesday.
The headline-grabber in the bill was an amendment to scrap the Low Emissions Zones in French cities - although that might still be open to challenge.
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But there's a lot more in this bill, which has had a complicated life - introduced by Gabriel Attal’s government last year and halted first by last summer’s snap election, then the collapse of Michel Barnier government, it has had hundreds of amendments added and subtracted during its lengthy parliamentary journey.
The bill contains 26 main measures intended to cut bureaucracy, and simplify administration, mostly aimed at businesses. It is based on a parliamentary report from February 2024 and was presented with an action plan that includes 26 other regulatory measures.
Administration and and business life
Governments can use decrees and ordinances to simplify administrative procedures and cut down the number of forms and procedures that businesses have to follow. More operations will be digitised, while the bill provides several policies to improve information sharing between government departments to reduce unnecessary duplication for businesses.
The government will also have to examine how future legislation might impact small and medium-sized businesses when bills are drafted. This should avoid brouhahas similar to the proposal to introduce lower VAT limits on micro-entrepreneurs.
Under the terms of the bill, by 2028 all public procurement contracts – including those from hospitals and social security organisations – will be handled through a single online platform to give businesses better access to necessary public procurement information.
To make it easier to sell companies with fewer than 50 employees, the legal period for employers to inform employees has been reduced to one month and the fine for failure to provide information has been reduced.
And professional bank account services will also be improved, including the ability to close an account without charge.
In terms of insurance, with regard to property damage, the draft law sets limits on the timeframes for compensating individual and professional policyholders at six months maximum from the date of the claim in cases where an expert is appointed, and two months in almost all other cases.
In addition, it extends the obligation for insurers to justify their decision to unilaterally terminate business insurance contracts, and gives very small businesses and SMEs the right to terminate property insurance at any time after the first anniversary of the contract.
Industrial and infrastructure projects
To encourage the establishment of factories or energy transition projects, exemptions from common law are provided for in various areas, such as the installation of wind turbines or relay antennas, and compensation for damage to biodiversity caused by development projects, particularly industrial projects.
An amendment by the government will make it possible to recognise the imperative reason of major public interest much earlier in the development of projects, and supplemented to allow the recognition of the public interest status for projects that have already been declared – including the controversial A69 autoroute in south-west France.
The bill provides, under certain conditions, for industrial-scale data centres to be classified as projects of major national interest, to speed up planning processes.
The mandate of the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties is also amended to take into account innovation issues in all areas of its work.
Payslips
Future payslips will be simplified under the remit of the bill to contain just 15 lines of information. Details about restaurant tickets and travel expenses will be available separately, but precise details have yet to be confirmed.
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Rural cafés
The bill includes measures to make it easier to open cafés and bars in rural areas by making it simpler to get a type four alcohol licence, known as a Licence IV, which covers spirits and liquor.
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Government mediation
The bill includes measures to make complaints against the French administration system easier, with a ‘generalisation’ of mediation, while current deadlines in place on taking legal action against the government will be put on hold.
Small businesses, micro-entrepreneurs and employees will certainly cheer several measures intended to make their daily lives easier, and the ‘tell us once’ policy that cuts out the duplication of required information will speed up certain processes, but at this stage it is difficult to judge how much simply life might become.
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