On 1 July, we attended the hearing at the Senate Industry Committee on DDL No. 1484 (Annual SME Law), welcoming the launch of a measure that had been awaited since 2011.

While we appreciate the measures envisaged, we believe it is essential to strengthen their scope with a more structural, stable and adherent approach to the real needs of SMEs, which are a pillar of the Italian economy.

In general terms, we emphasised the importance of having:

• a structured, long-term overview;
• targeted simplifications capable of ensuring a more favourable and adequate regulatory and institutional environment for SMEs;
• a industrial policy characterised by incentives, stability and comprehensible and straightforward application rules, ensuring that the resources earmarked for SMEs find concrete and effective use and that this is functional to their dimensional development.

Among our points of interest, on which we nevertheless highlighted a possible enhancement: the simplifications on health and safety at work and exemption from third-party motor liability insurance obligations, which incorporate some of the measures proposed by Confindustria in 'Zero Costs', the tax breaks for business networkscoordination of the rules on startupincubators and innovative SMEs, the Delegation of power to the Government on the reorganisation of the regulation of Confidi and measures in the field of access to creditthe entrustment to the SME Guarantor of the reality checks to identify the regulatory, technical and economic obstacles impacting on SMEs, an aspect on which we request the reactivation of the permanent table at MIMIT.

Finally, we proposed to supplement the text with further measures on natural emergencies e skillswhich are essential for the qualitative strengthening of SMEs.