The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)
My noble Friend, Minister of State for Trade and Investment (joint with Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Lord Green, has today made the following statement:
I wish to inform the House that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has established the UK single market centre, a national co-ordinating team responsible for monitoring the functioning of the European single market.
The single market centre will bring together our work on all the existing tools that support the functioning of the single market, including the internal market scoreboard, SOLVIT (the problem solving mechanism that seeks to resolve the misapplication of rules by public authorities), the internal market information system, and policy responsibility for the point of single contact (the online licensing service for services directive implementation).
The objectives of establishing such a centre are to give greater visibility, and therefore focus, within Government on improving the UK’s performance in implementing internal market measures and to build stronger links between single market policy and operations to support our European policy through specific examples of market barriers. Over time, I hope that the work of the single market centre will increase awareness among UK businesses and consumers of the support available to them to trade and shop in the internal market.
The single market centre will report annually on the performance of the single market in the UK, and copies of this report will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.