Today Vito Grassi, Vice President of Confindustria and President of the Council of Regional Representations and for Territorial Cohesion Policies of Confindustria, spoke at a hearing at the Commission for Constitutional Affairs of the Senate of the Republic on Draft laws for the implementation of differentiated autonomy.

For Confindustria, differentiated autonomy is a constitutional principle in itself worthy of implementation. If properly calibrated, it can represent an opportunity to increase competitiveness and enhance the specificities of territories. It is a process that, without increasing the gaps between regions and without distorting the decision-making prerogatives provided for by the law, can strengthen the territories in the wake of the principles of subsidiarity, efficiency and solidarity. The autonomy debate, in fact, can contribute to improving the quality of public services at local level, under the banner of empowerment, as long as it maintains constant coordination with those national policies geared to the growth and competitiveness of the production system.

The reform process that is the subject of the DDL under consideration involves institutional, financial and efficiency evaluations of our bureaucratic apparatus; the reform is grafted onto a series of gaps, constitutional and otherwise, the resolution of which is crucial for the eventual transfer of competences.

Important in the first placethe determination of OELs e the identification of the resources needed to deal with itbut also the realisation of the principle of equalisation in order to compensate the imbalances suffered by territories with lower fiscal capacity.

More generally, we detect an issue of financial sustainability to be addressed in the implementation of the reform.

The DDL presented by the government states that it must be established in advance:

• the LEP, i.e. that core of services to be provided, on equal terms, throughout the national territory, to guarantee the protection of civil and social rights;
• the related standard requirements and costs, i.e. the resources needed to provide those services and the related costs.

Accordingly, the determination of OELs is the prerequisite for quantifying the resources needed to ensure them in the various territories. The operation presupposes a necessary balance between the available resources and the set of OELs to be guaranteed.

This is a correct choice; At the same time, we share the fears of those who believe that the achievement of these goals, in the absence of an additional allocation of resources, may not be obvious.

Furthermore, we believe a definition of the OELs that is not limited to the subjects that are actually 'transferred', but refers to the entire perimeter of the subjects that are 'transferable' to the regions, is appropriate (together with the resources needed to finance them); in fact, the first hypothesis would lead to a risk for the equalisation objectives, as it is necessary to have as much information as possible about the financial impact on the state budget.

Only a reconnaissance of overall financial needs, therefore, will be able to ensure an orderly management of these aspects.

There are two risks to be avoided, namely: i) regions have to provide essential services with insufficient resources; (ii) the recognition to some regions of special forms and conditions of autonomy (with the corresponding resources) prejudices the possibility of allocating to the other regions the resources necessary to guarantee the LEPs for which they are responsible.

Those just mentioned are some of the reasons why we believe thatin a first phase, the implementation of autonomy should focus, following a gradual and 'experimental' approach, on a limited number of subjects or subject areas.

The point we consider crucial is to leave some strategic competences for market protection to national management, those subjects essential for:

• ensure the basic conditions for competitiveness and development. For example, energy and transport infrastructures (and more generally, networked services), as well as foreign trade; matters that require coordination mechanisms that can only be ensured through unified management;
• guarantee regulatory and administrative homogeneity for economic operators. That is, excessive fragmentation on strategic development issues, such as the environment, must be avoided.

Also for these reasons we call for a step-by-step approach in the selection of subjects to be transferred. This was to ensure an orderly 'handover', also with a view to fulfilling the commitments made with the EU regarding the implementation of the PNRR.

Furthermore, the shift of competences (legislative and administrative) to the territory should be geared towards efficiency and speedy management. This highlights an issue of administrative sustainability of the reformi.e. the actual capacity of regional systems to cope with the newly transferred competencies. These are ensure the maintenance of existing administrative structuressince the regions will have to bear, on their own, the administrative functions and public services related to the transferred subjects.

Administrative sustainability, linked to financial sustainability, should therefore be considered a pre-condition of autonomy, not an objective to be achieved in a second phase.

This consideration, and those on transferable subjects, call into question a general theme: the need to include the implementation of differentiated autonomy in a broader reflection, which focuses on the need to rethinking Title V of our Constitutionby rebalancing a division of competences that has proved, in the test of time, to be dysfunctional with respect to the needs of the economy and a source of endless disputes.

It is an issue that we also consider a priority in the context of institutional reforms.

Finally, as for theprocedure procedure through which State-region agreements, and in particular the prerogatives of Parliamentwe observe that this is certainly a relevant issue, but one that should be approached pragmatically. Solutions are not lacking and several have already been proposed by experts. Among them, we welcome the idea of making binding, according to varying degrees of 'intensity', the acts of address that Parliament may address to the Government during the negotiation phase with the regions, so as to ensure the centrality of Parliament itself, given also the special attention that will have to be paid to the financial sustainability profiles of this reform.

We believe that the government's DDL has given impetus to a reform that is both useful and, at the same time, not without its delicate elements, which should be discussed openly and with due caution. The change in the organisational structure will involve all actors in our governance multilevel, but also citizens and businesses; hence the need for broad involvement of social actors.

A very demanding challenge: Confindustria is available to make its contribution, in the interests of companies and the country.