​​​During the 4 March 2021 Plenary session of the European Commission's Fit for Future Platform (F4F), the Platform Chair and Vice-President of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, requested the CoR's RegHub to present a special report on planning and permitting for infrastructure.

As part of its recovery and resilience efforts, the EU is getting ready to invest unseen resources in major infrastructure projects. Since infrastructure projects touch upon the interests and competences of local and regional authorities, evidence from local and regional stakeholders can help identify opportunities to speed up planning and permitting procedures and make them more efficient.

The purpose of the consultation is to gather experiences and evidence from local and regional stakeholders who can testify how EU rules influence planning and permitting on the ground and put forward solutions in its special F4F report to improve the implementation and enforcement of these rules in the context of infrastructure projects.

Previous RegHub consultations have highlighted the network's strong potential to gather unique user-experience and data from relevant local and regional stakeholders on the implementation of EU policies. This capacity matches the European Commission's and its Fit for Future Platform's goal to achieve evidence-based policymaking through targeted and inclusive stakeholder consultations.​​