Brussels, 19/05/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission presented measures on Tuesday 19 May to improve the quality of the legislative process and a new REFIT programme for reducing the administrative burden.
To be able to better assess the impact and monitor the quality of its own draft legislation, the Commission has announced that its impact assessment board will be transformed into an “independent Regulatory Scrutiny Board”, the role of which will be extended to include preparing quality reports of existing legislation. The members of this new board will be more independent and half of its number will be recruited from outside the Commission, it is promised in a press release.
Impact assessments on proposed legislation are henceforth to be conducted throughout the legislative process. The Commission says an ad hoc expert group can be set up upon request of the Parliament, Council or Commission to analyse whether an amended proposal is practical to implement, creates understandable rights and obligations for the interested parties, and avoids disproportionate costs.
More targeted and participative REFIT programme.
The more targeted programme will look at the most serious sources of inefficiency and unnecessary burden, and will also quantify the costs and benefits of actions wherever possible, the Commission says in a press release. The Commission intends to make the new REFIT programme a fundamental part of its annual work programme and of its political dialogue with the other EU institutions.
The new, more participative REFIT will seek to further integrate stakeholders throughout the legislative process. A “platform” will be established bringing together high-level experts from business, civil society, social partners, the Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of Regions and member states. It will collect suggestions from the ground for reducing the regulatory and administrative burden and bring forward concrete ideas. The procedure for the recruitment of these experts will begin before the end of June.
When the social partners conclude an agreement among themselves, they will be able to ask the Commission to bring forward a proposal for a decision by the Council with a view to incorporating that agreement into EU law. After a detailed impact assessment, the Commission will decide whether the agreement should be accepted or rejected. It will not, however, be able to bring any amendments.
Parliament Left incredulous.
Reactions to these proposals from those on the Left in the European Parliament was immediate. The Commission “is once again taking a good idea and spectacularly twisting it”, regretted the joint leader of the Greens/EFA Group, Philippe Lamberts (Belgium). He fears “major control of the legislative process, a reduction in regulation” and more red tape due to “the increase in impact assessments at all levels of the legislative process”. These assessments would be welcome if they took greater account of social and environmental considerations, he said, critical of the Commission for its “purely quantitative approach of cost assessment” (our translation).
The S&D Group made it clear that will adopt the greatest vigilance. Noting the Commission's proposals, Enrique Guerrero Salom (Spain) promised to negotiate with the other groups in Parliament and the other European institutions, “bearing in mind that better regulation sometimes may mean 'less', but often means 'more'”. “We must be wary of those who will want to use this agreement to other ends than those benefiting European citizens and who see it as a way to simply exempt businesses from their obligations to workers, consumers or the environment”, stated Richard Corbett (UK). (Mathieu Bion)