Brussels, 04/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - Any new draft European legislation in the future will have to be given the go-ahead by an independent team of experts to ensure that it will not create too great an administrative burden for companies, under a draft report by the European Commission on better regulation, due to be released on 19 May and leaked to the media at the end of April.
Under the new plans, the process of preparing EU legislation would open up to the outer world and a board of experts would replace the current body responsible for impact assessments. This board would have 6 members, three of them recruited from among European staff. The board would work full-time and experts would not be allowed to do any other work for the Commission.
The European Commission wants to make more of the consultation periods for stakeholders for new legislation, which will be increased to twelve weeks. Once draft legislation has been published, another window of opportunity would open, this time for eight weeks, when any citizen or other player would have the opportunity to comment on the draft legislation. The comments would be submitted to the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers to feed into the decision-making process.
The consultation period would also cover delegated acts of legislation, which will be open for comments on the Commission's website for a four-week period.
Under this provisional draft report, the Commission would call on the EP and Council to improve the impact assessments for any amendments they might wish to make to draft legislation. (Solenn Paulic)