On 19 November 2025, the European Commission adopted the long-awaited 2030 Consumer Agenda, its strategic plan for EU consumer policy for the next five years. This is the most recent rendition of the Commission’s periodic consumer policy blueprints, preceded by the New Consumer Agenda 2020-2025. The 2030 Agenda is entitled ‘A new impulse for consumer protection, competitiveness and sustainable growth’, clearly aligning with the new Commission’s priority on boosting EU competitiveness.
Here is a rundown of the main priorities together with concrete action plans in the 2030 Agenda:
- Completing the single market for consumers: This part complements the previously announced Single Market Strategy. The Commission aims to remove obstacles for consumers to access goods and services across the single market through, for example, an evaluation of the Geo-Blocking Regulation and tackling Territorial Supply Constraints. Particular attention is given to fostering cross-border financial services (e.g. the possibility of opening savings and investment accounts in another Member State) and cross-border mobility services (especially for rail travel, through, e.g., a single ticketing service).
- Digital fairness and consumer protection online: The Commission reaffirmed its commitment to introduce a Digital Fairness Act to act against practices such as dark patterns, addictive design features or unfair personalisation, with a particular focus on the protection of minors. This initiative has already drawn tremendous attention. Other actions include fighting against online fraud (e.g., revising the Payment Services Directive) and fostering fair and transparent use of AI in consumer markets (though no specific action has been tabled besides the reference to the AI Act, which says little about consumer contracts).
- Promoting sustainable consumption: Sustainable consumption was the centrepiece of the preview consumer agenda, shaped by the European Green Deal, and several sustainability instruments have been adopted since then. So the Commission’s new priority in this regard focuses on implementation. New actions include a Circular Economy Act (which in itself does not concern consumers too much) and the accompanying promotion of consumer returns of unused goods, second-hand markets and product-as-a-service business models, as well as measures to foster ‘green by design’ in e-commerce. In this ‘sustainability’ section, the Commission has also discussed its actions to ensure affordability (transport, energy, housing, food) and public health (forever chemicals, tobacco).
- Effective enforcement and redress: This has been a perennial issue that has practically reappeared in all of the consumer agendas. The Commission will propose a revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation to promote coordinated action in consumer enforcement across the EU. A major new challenge to enforcement comes from e-commerce and the growing circulation of unsafe or non-compliant products originating from third countries, which has already been flagged in the E-Commerce Communication. In this regard, the Commission is set to reform the Market Surveillance Regulation in the announced European Product Act.
In a time when ‘simplification’ and deregulation secure the Commission’s top priority, the 2030 Agenda seems to maintain a rather high standard of consumer protection, though consumer lawyers should probably proceed with utmost caution to ensure that ‘simplification efforts shouldn’t come at the expense of consumers’. The twin transitions still drive the agenda of EU consumer policy. Besides enforcement, digital fairness and e-commerce are likely to be the most relevant fields of EU consumer law for years to come. Sustainable consumption has not disappeared, though its prominence has undoubtedly diminished compared with the previous agenda.
A couple of more personal reflections from my first reading of the Agenda: First, it is positive that the Commission has explicitly acknowledged the everyday experiences of European consumers shaped by the cost-of-living crisis and vowed, albeit in quite abstract terms, to tackle the uneven impact of rising energy, housing and food prices. Second, the Agenda seems to signal a shift in the background understanding of the image of EU consumers. Instead of only talking about confident consumers ‘reaping the benefits of the single market’ and empowered consumers ‘driving the green and digital transitions through informed choices’, the 2030 Agenda began to highlight the structural barriers holding consumers back. In particular, the Commission noted ‘barriers to choosing genuinely sustainable options, such as price, limited choice, unclear and inaccessible labelling, and mistrust of environmental claims’ (italics added). In a sense, the Agenda appears to rebalance – or at least complement – the emphasis on consumer responsibility to make informed choices with a stronger focus on regulatory responsibility to ensure fairness, affordability and sustainability ‘by design’. Of course, this may be a far-fetched (and optimistic) reading, and it remains to be seen how these grand commitments will unfold in the coming years.
