The Government has already laid its cards on the table. This week, the Council of Ministers has given the green light to the Annual Regulatory Plan (PAN) which includes 179 initiatives: commitments, desires, aspirations, of an Executive that faces its last year of legislature.
The PAN is a planning instrument where the laws and regulations that the Government plans to approve during the fiscal year are detailed in advance. An acronym, whose shadow marks the administration and under whose umbrella the lack of legislative action can be disguised: since the PAN is limited to proposals within the framework of the Council of Ministers, if the bill later gets stuck or fails during the parliamentary processing phase, the Government can excuse itself by saying that "it tried".
The origins of this transparency mechanism date back to the LPAC (Law on the Common Administrative Procedure of Public Administrations) and the LRJP (Legal Regime of the Public Sector), another soup of acronyms that is part of the daily life of anyone who deals with the administration since 2015. Both laws were promoted during the first term of Mariano Rajoy as a result of the work carried out by the Commission for the Reform of Public Administrations (CORA) led by Soraya Saénz de Santamaría and Cristóbal Montoro.
Looking ahead
One would have to wait two years until the Government gave shape to the materialization of the PAN. It did so in 2017 via royal decree in which the Board of Planning and Regulatory Evaluation was also created and it was specified what the subsequent evaluation report should be like.
On paper, the different ministries must send to the Board the regulatory initiatives they wish to incorporate before March 1st. Subsequently, the minister with the competencies of the Presidency (in this case, Félix Bolaños) submits the bill to the Council of Ministers for approval before April 30th of the year prior to its coming into effect. However, the document for 2026 has seen the light of day when five months of the year have already passed.
Card on the table, prisoner?
The non-compliance with the initiatives included in the PAN does not entail any sanction, as it is a mere provision. At most, it may entail public opinion's reproach or subsequent punishment at the polls.
Although it is a closed document, ministers may submit proposals to the Council of Ministers that do not appear, justifying them adequately in the Memory of Regulatory Impact Analysis, and it must be submitted to an "ex post" evaluation. On the other hand, only in special circumstances (multiplicity of projects or formation of a new Government) may the Minister of the Presidency be asked to propose the modification of the PAN to the Government. It is also common for initiatives that are not approved one year to be "inherited" by the following document.
Evaluating, which is gerund
The first PAN that saw the light of day was the one from 2018. It was approved in December 2017 under the Rajoy Government and included 287 norms. However, the triumph of the motion of no confidence by Pedro Sánchez months later led to the paradox of an executive with the roadmap of the previous one (the same happened with the PGE). For its part, the first PAN of the coalition government arrived in 2020, as in 2019 institutional paralysis resulting from the electoral repetition prevented its elaboration. Since 2020, the PAN has not only been approved annually, but an evaluative report on its compliance has also been prepared. At the time of presenting each of the analyses, usually coinciding with the presentation of the new PAN, this was the degree of compliance:
- 2020 – 51% Approved, and 36% in progress.
- 2021 – 57% Approved, and 37% in progress.
- 2022 – 53% Approved, and 26% in progress.
- 2023 – 40% Approved, and 12% in progress.
- 2024 – 44.95% Approved, and 15.66% in progress.
- 2025 – 36.18% Approved, and 46.23% in progress.