The Letta report explained: Much More Than a Market and the fifth freedom

In April 2024, two governments asked an Italian to tell Europe what was wrong with its oldest achievement. Spain's and Belgium's governments, together with the Commission and with the backing of the European Council, asked Enrico Letta, president of the Jacques Delors Institute, to write a report on the future of the single market. He spent seven months on it, visited 65 European cities and held more than 400 meetings, and presented Much More Than a Market: Speed, Security, Solidarity to EU leaders on 18 April 2024. Yesterday we explained the Draghi report, which Letta's mandate expressly fed into. The two documents are a pair: Draghi says what Europe must invest in, Letta says what kind of market it has to become for that investment to work.

What Letta diagnoses

Letta's starting point is historical. When the single market was built, three sectors were deliberately left out of it: finance, electronic communications and energy. The idea was that they were too strategic to hand over to European rules. Letta argues that their lack of integration is a primary reason for Europe's declining competitiveness, and his examples make the case. Europe has a market with more than 100 telecoms operators. Its private savings amount to €33 trillion, held mostly in currency and deposits, and about €300 billion of European families' savings leave every year for other economies, mostly the US, because Europe's financial markets are fragmented.

His answer for each of the three is a roadmap for 2024–2029 and a two-layer model of supervision: a European authority for rules with a single market dimension, national authorities for the rest. In energy he asks for a further leap in interconnection and massive investment in grids and a hydrogen backbone. In finance he proposes turning the unfinished capital markets union into a savings and investments union, so that European savings fund European firms.

The fifth freedom and the freedom to stay

The proposal that gave the report its fame is a fifth freedom. The single market rests on four: goods, services, capital and people. Letta proposes adding a fifth, covering research, innovation, data, skills, knowledge and education, anchored in the research title of the EU treaty. He describes it as "the freedom of investigating, exploring and creating for the benefit of humankind". In practice that means researchers, data and qualifications moving across borders as easily as a pallet of goods, and European science funded and organised at the scale of the Union.

The second idea is less famous and, for Spain, maybe more important. Letta notes that about 135 million Europeans, nearly a third of the population, live in places that have fallen behind, and that people and small firms there feel the weight of EU rules while seeing few of the benefits. So alongside free movement he proposes a freedom to stay: free movement should be a choice, and the single market should let citizens thrive in the community they choose. That requires accessible, affordable public services in every region, for which he asks a European action plan, and a social dimension built into every step of integration.

The rest of the programme is concrete. A European code of business law offering a 28th regime, an optional set of company rules for the whole Union, which Letta calls a game changer for SMEs. A State aid contribution mechanism, under which member states would put part of their national subsidies into pan-European projects, with stricter enforcement of national aid, so that the countries with the deepest pockets cannot fragment the market. A common market for defence, after a period in which around 80% of European spending in support of Ukraine went on non-European equipment. And a solidarity facility for enlargement.

What has happened since

The Commission has picked up a good part of it. It launched the savings and investments union in March 2025, observing that about 70% of EU household savings, €10 trillion, sit in bank deposits. In May 2025 it published a Single Market Strategy that cites Letta and Draghi and goes after what it calls the "Terrible Ten" barriers, among them complicated rules for setting up a business, the recognition of professional qualifications and restrictive national services rules. Services are about 75% of EU GDP, yet only 1% of construction services are traded across borders. In March 2026 the Commission proposed the 28th regime as EU Inc., which we explain in what is the 28th regime. And in April 2026 Parliament, Council and Commission signed a joint One Europe, One Market roadmap with a deadline of the end of 2027 and quarterly reviews. Letta has kept pushing: in February 2026 he told an audience in Dublin that the most effective reaction to Trump was to create one market.

Where we land

Letta's report suits radical centrism because it refuses to choose between the market and the regions. Our position takes from the left his freedom to stay: decent schools, clinics, transport and quality jobs in every province, and pooling some state aid so that rich countries cannot buy the single market for themselves. From the liberal market tradition it takes the completion of the market in finance, energy and telecoms, one company law and European savings flowing to the firms that can grow, because that is where productivity comes from. And it adds the test that belongs to neither: the fifth freedom should be judged by whether a young woman in Jaén or Soria can study, found a company, sell across the Union and raise capital in Frankfurt or Milan without leaving home. Digital company formation, recognised qualifications, data that travels and fast broadband are the practical form of a freedom to stay. For Spain, which sponsored the report, that test should guide its negotiating priorities in Brussels.