Right to Stay Strategy – Your Region, Your Future – Call for Evidence – EuroCommerce response

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Without a viable retail and wholesale presence, quality of life declines and depopulation accelerates, undermining the right to stay.

Retail and wholesale are indispensable to enabling citizens’ right to stay in the place they call home. As Europe’s largest private employer, with 26 million jobs across 5 million companies (over 99% SMEs), the sector provides economic activity across the whole of the EU, including rural and remote areas, or those with geographical particularities, economic decline or limited opportunities.

Retail and wholesale are part of the social infrastructure, provide a gateway to essential services that helps maintain a reliable standard of living, including in the time of crisis, across the EU. It is a source of local employment and an anchor in the community.

EuroCommerce therefore calls for a place-based, investment-driven strategy that fully recognises retail and wholesale as core infrastructure for regional resilience and attractiveness, to give EU citizens the freedom to stay in the community of their choice. Retail and wholesale needs to be seen as a key partner.

 KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

Retail and wholesale provide a reason to stay.

A competitive retail and wholesale sector supports local economies and employment, through first and stable jobs, flexible working, acting as a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation, and creating local value chains, supporting SMEs and regional producers. Its presence strengthens social cohesion and community life, providing proximity, contributing to preparedness, urban circularity including tackling food waste, and to towns and villages decarbonisation and energy efficiency efforts.

The factors that affect the ability for people and businesses to remain in a certain place include lack of infrastructure, regulatory fragmentation and rigidity, and declining demand and viability risks.

From a retail and wholesale perspective, public policies to support prosperity and help make EU regions remain an attractive place should focus on:

• - Improving infrastructure and connectivity.
• - Placing retail and wholesale at the core of the Right to Stay Strategy.
• - Strengthening multilevel governance and stakeholder involvement (public-private cooperation).
• - Launching an EU programme for revitalising rural, remote, and small urban areas.
• - Ensuring agile and proportionate planning and regulatory frameworks.

What will enable the competitiveness of retail and wholesale, so it remains viable and can anchor the right to stay:

• - Safeguarding employment.
• - Restore the level playing field in retail to address growing concerns over non-compliant third-country traders and marketplaces.
• - Simplifying regulation and ensuring rules are proportionate and implementable.
• - Supporting retail and wholesale’s competitiveness by taking action on territorial supply constraints, focusing the revision of the Unfair Trading Practices Directive on small farmers and SME processors, ensuring the role of retail and wholesale is recognised in the Circular Economy Act, and tackling the imbalance of power with card schemes.

Read the full text of the position paper below.