RECOMMENDATIONS

Follow the vision set out in the Remkes Report (2022) to provide a structural solution to the nitrogen problem. Immediately draw up a plan with, at minimum, concrete enforceable targets, an ambitious timeline, and sufficient budget for restructuring livestock farming and nature restoration, so that nitrogen reduction is legally secured.

Begin immediately in 2026 with both voluntary and mandatory measures at local and national level to get licensing moving. Dare to make hard choices directly, for example through mandatory buyouts.

Reclaim national oversight for projects of major economic and strategic importance to the Netherlands. Designate locations for this purpose, and implement tolerance arrangements for parallel construction and licensing.

Require municipalities to allocate sufficient land for businesses.

Legally anchor national oversight on key economic themes and projects, through a targeted amendment to the Environment and Planning Act or a separate fast-track regulation for crucial projects, so that the necessary acceleration is achieved to realise structural growth of at least 1.5% to 2.0%.

Standardise the application of the Environment and Planning Act and accelerate licensing procedures by broadly applying national frameworks and successful regional best practices. Where municipalities and regions cannot achieve the necessary speed, the national government must be able to intervene to accelerate decision-making.

Treat space for businesses comparably to housing construction. Limit the duration of appeal and objection procedures here as well, and implement a Business Regulation Act to shorten the lead time for business licences.

Use regulatory sandboxes to stimulate innovation in socially important sectors. Ensure sufficient capacity at supervisory authorities to support this.

Remove national gold-plating of EU regulations. Do not do more, but also not less, and opt for low-burden transposition into national law. Collaborate with neighbouring countries to accelerate integration and harmonise legislation on matters of strategic importance.

Immediately abandon the strictly accounting-based application of the definition 'undertaking in difficulty' in granting state aid and apply a proportionality test for start-ups and scale-ups. Utilise, as other member states do, the maximum interpretive scope and exception possibilities within the legislation and take the lead at EU level in modernising these definitions.

Prevent businesses, housing construction, and other projects from becoming stuck on the Water Framework Directive in 2027. Draw lessons from the nitrogen dossier. Map the risks and act swiftly and decisively with a legally secured solution.

Steer sharply on quality across the entire education chain. Allow less freedom on crucial subjects such as basic skills, and mandate the use of proven effective teaching methods. Anchor this in the supervisory framework.

Invest with a focus on quality improvement. Start with teacher and school leader training. Strengthen career opportunities for excellent teachers, especially in pre-vocational education.

Halve the administrative burden in education.

Embed technology and digital literacy in primary and secondary education curricula. Ensure specifically that girls and women are encouraged in technical and digital interests.

Increase structural funding for technology across all levels of education, from vocational to university. Ensure that STEM programmes can raise or abolish their numerus fixus and improve the quality of their courses.

Set a concrete target for STEM talent availability. Then steer talent supply through funding and policy so it aligns with what the economy needs to staff its highly productive sectors.

Limit enrolment in programmes with limited labour market potential and societal benefits.

Invest in an active and targeted migration and settlement programme that encourages foreign talent to come to and remain working in the Netherlands. Focus this effort primarily on sectors with the greatest shortages, such as technology, ICT, energy and biomedical technology, and discourage low-productivity labour migration.

Maintain and broaden fiscal advantages for knowledge workers, such as the 30% ruling.

Make it financially attractive for students from outside the EU to pursue STEM programmes here.

Create public-private training programmes so that reskilling better matches labour market demand. Pay specific attention to shortage sectors and productivity-enhancing skills such as digitalisation, AI implementation, and process innovation.

Make upskilling and reskilling fiscally attractive for employers and employees in the same way as currently done for R&D.

Establish regional productivity centres that support SMEs in the adoption and implementation of technology, so that new developments are applied more quickly and effectively in business across every region.

Introduce a modern 'flexicurity' model that gives companies room for agile and innovative operations without workers losing their fundamental social security protections. Ensure broad support with social partners during development. Abolish the second year of continued salary payment by employers during sick leave.

Reform the transition payment received upon dismissal. Link this to the development of a fiscally attractive personal development budget, so that people are either working or learning.

Focus job-to-job transition programmes on critical shortage sectors such as healthcare, ICT and technology.

Strengthen national oversight on land use: steer from the national government the construction of energy infrastructure at the most efficient locations. Accelerate site allocation, land acquisition, and licensing to the absolute minimum and set maximum appeal and objection deadlines.

Make flexible grid use the norm for large consumers by removing financial and regulatory barriers. Subsidise where costs to the business and benefits to the broader economy are not evenly distributed. Also create financial incentives for flexible grid use among small consumers, for example in electric vehicle charging.

Lower grid stability requirements to create more capacity within the existing infrastructure.

Use our existing gas capacity pragmatically as transition technology: give strategically located installations a clear future perspective for managing peak loads and relieving the grid.

In the short term, lower the energy tax on electricity for industrial large consumers to the European minimum rate, in line with the plans of Draghi and the European Commission.

Dampen rising grid tariffs by implementing congestion measures as quickly as possible. Actively stimulate energy innovation, from research to demonstration and large-scale implementation. Do this for both decentralised solutions and system technologies, including SMRs and hydrogen electrolysis. The government must act as a launching customer to accelerate breakthroughs and generate investment.

Ensure that the energy price in the Netherlands is at most at the same level as in Germany and Belgium. Do not burden Dutch companies more heavily than competitors in neighbouring countries, for example through a national CO₂ tax.

Develop a National Energy Plan that, together with industry, makes clear choices about the future energy mix, the required infrastructure, energy innovation, and the regulatory adjustments needed for this.

Use innovative instruments such as contracts-for-difference to provide two-sided certainty at limited cost.

Concretely identify the sectors that must be retained within the Netherlands and Europe to avoid risky strategic dependencies.

Offer these sectors a concrete future perspective through a combination of European demand coordination, protection against Chinese dumping, and coordinating support for sustainability. Gradually expand the European CBAM mechanism so that products imported from outside the EU bear comparable CO₂ costs.

Ensure structural funding for knowledge infrastructure within the key ecosystems, such as cleanrooms, computing capacity, and campuses to stimulate innovation. Develop, together with knowledge institutions, the business community, and the regions, a national plan that secures the development, resilience, coherence, and utilisation of this infrastructure. Allocate the 1.5% margin within the NATO framework of 5% for this purpose.

Provide structural co-financing for academic spin-off creation, linked to entrepreneurship-friendly conditions. Consolidate the efforts of TTOs into one national TTO.

Make Project Beethoven not a one-off, but structurally collaborate public-privately to resolve bottlenecks in growth and innovation within these ecosystems.

Link aviation tax to funds for sustainability and modernisation, so that Schiphol can take the lead in sustainability and the money flows back into the Dutch economy.

Support the further development and sustainability of the Port of Rotterdam by providing space and enabling further seaward expansion.

Organise and fund public-private partnerships to invest in the short term in intercontinental and intra-European submarine cables.

Prioritise space and energy supply for (co-location) data centres. Collaborate with municipalities to use space and grid capacity smartly, but maintain central oversight on required capacity.

Formulate realistic policy that transcends the annual budget cycle and stick to it. Strengthen public-private cooperation, for example around major infrastructure projects, to increase trust between government and investors.

Lower the effective marginal tax burden on labour and profits by abolishing inefficient fiscal schemes. Harmonise our fiscal system with competitive EU member states.

Stimulate investments by maintaining innovation-stimulating legislation and broadening the investment deduction scheme for investments in innovative sectors.

Introduce a fiscally attractive Dutch equivalent of the Swedish investment savings account to activate household savings and link them to national investment priorities.

Force the creation of a European Capital Markets Union by 2028, including a European Savings and Investment Union.

If consensus cannot be reached at EU level, the Netherlands must take the initiative with other proponents and begin with a coalition of the willing that undertakes harmonisation initiatives on a smaller scale.

Ensure, through increased fund investments, that Dutch funds can achieve sufficient scale to provide growth capital to fast-growing companies.

Increase market expertise through an 'entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs' reinvestment scheme.

Provide more targeted support to first-time fund managers from underrepresented groups and fund managers focused on the underdeveloped deep tech segment.

Fully calculate the costs of the preconditions needed to realise growth of at least 1.5% to 2.0%. Include these in the budget. Explicitly prioritise a highly productive economy. Deploy scarce resources for highly productive sectors over low-productivity activities.

Dampen cost increases in consumer spending within the national budget and avoid incidental purchasing power increases at the expense of investments in the future prosperity of the Netherlands.

Sell non-strategic state-owned enterprises and use the proceeds for necessary investments in preconditions or a capital injection into the National Investment Bank or a National Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (see section 5.3). Prevent their use for consumer spending.

Allow national debt to rise for necessary investments with proven returns and significant societal benefits, such as in energy infrastructure, knowledge, and innovation.

Encourage, while respecting their independence, the further development of economic forecasting models at planning agencies and knowledge institutions, so that long-term effects of productivity-enhancing investments - such as in R&D - can be better weighed in budget and policy decisions.

On this basis, introduce a system within budgetary policy that clearly distinguishes between consumer spending and investments. Assess and prioritise policy proposals with major financial impact as standard based on their contribution to the necessary economic growth of at least 1.5% to 2.0% per year.

Integrate Invest-NL and Invest International into one powerful institution with core capital of EUR 10 to 20 billion. Place this bank at arm's length from politics, with professional financial management.

Ensure that this bank, together with parties in the financial market, finances the innovation and industrialisation chain. Allow the bank to activate private capital on a large scale to dampen public contributions.

Focus the institution's mandate on financing strategic projects and precondition infrastructure within the four strategic domains in this report.

Organise the NABI as an autonomous public organisation, at arm's length from government, with an independent multi-year budget of EUR 1.5 to 2.0 billion and a clear mission to realise breakthrough innovations within the four domains of this report.

Act as a launching customer as government. Establish in a national public procurement strategy that a fixed percentage of the procurement budget is spent on innovation-oriented solutions, including those from the NABI.

Make the Prime Minister ultimately responsible for future prosperity and achieving 1.5 to 2.0% growth. The direction on this dossier must come from the Prime Minister, based on a clear agenda supported by the cabinet.

Therefore let the Prime Minister, rather than the Minister of Finance, report on these goals on accountability day.

Appoint an independent, legally anchored Commissioner for Future Prosperity with a seven-year mandate. Provide this government commissioner with an effective execution unit, a dedicated fund, and strong connections to rapid-delivery teams within departments to accelerate stalled dossiers, preconditions, and investment projects.

Establish a ministerial committee for Future Prosperity.

Reverse departmental splits that were made for political reasons, starting with one Ministry of Economic Affairs, Trade and Energy.

Establish a National Investment Council chaired by the Prime Minister that puts strategic bottlenecks and opportunities in the Dutch economy on the agenda.

Simplify regulations and standardise processes so that less coordination, fewer civil servants, and less oversight are needed across all levels of government.

Promote a cultural change in which taking risks is rewarded. Encourage the civil service to be entrepreneurial and experimental, so that the government becomes more innovative in achieving policy objectives.