A campaign to cut red tape for German businesses, municipalities and citizens will pick up speed after the Cabinet agreed on Wednesday to a draft law aimed at tackling the country's notorious thicket of bureaucracy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised.
Its main features include shorter retention periods for selected company documents, an end to some reporting obligations for overnight stays in hotels, and replacing government forms that currently require a handwritten signature with emails and mobile messages.
Scholz said Europe's largest economy had to do more to simplify processes and move to more paperless record-keeping systems.
"Reducing bureaucracy is one of the federal government's major tasks, one of our major projects. And we have taken another major step forward today," Scholz said.
The individual measures in the draft law are based on proposals from the ministries in Berlin and from an online survey of industry associations.
The Cabinet broadly approved the main features of the text last summer. At that time, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, from the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), spoke of a "bureaucratic burnout" in many companies.
In an interview with public broadcaster ARD on Wednesday, Buschmann said that if there was a "world championship in bureaucracy," then Germany had won it.
"It's a bit like building up belly fat over the years. You can't get rid of it overnight by pressing a button," he said, acknowledging that many believe the planned law does not go nearly far enough.
The text still has to be discussed and passed by lawmakers.
For Verena Pausder, chairwoman of the Startup Association, the law is a good step, but only a first one.
"We simply find it incredibly difficult to abolish things in Germany that we once introduced, even if they no longer make sense," she said on Deutschlandfunk radio.
She also mentioned other priorities, like the the new Skilled Immigration Act: "If the visa process takes so long, then it doesn't help us that much because people still have to wait forever to get a job."
Wolfgang Große Entrup, chief executive of the German Chemical Industry Association, said a "grand plan" to reduce bureaucracy was still needed.
"Germany has a cellar full of unnecessary laws," he said. "We need to clear out. A little spring-cleaning is not enough."
