The Better Regulation, a veritable battle horse of the current European Commission, was intended to give car manufacturers a free hand that would have helped them to abandon fraudulent practices that led to the emissions scandals, explains Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) in a report published on Friday 24 February.
The Better Regulation idea was introduced in 2002 (see EUROPE 8309) to rationalise legislative decisions at European level through regulatory simplification and systematic impact assessments before introducing new legislation or revising existing rules.
CEO says the idea behind this apparently justified approach had four undesirable side effects (CEO specialises in analysing the action of big multinationals in the European sphere).
Firstly, under the guise of ‘evidence-based policy-making’, impact assessments were introduced for all policy decisions to consider economic costs and benefits. This tends to pit social and environmental benefits - by default difficult to quantify - against economic costs, with an emphasis on ensuring that regulated industries retain ‘competitiveness’. Costs for business tend to be prioritised over benefits for society, explains CEO.
Secondly, through the focus on co- and self-regulation: to ‘simplify’ the regulatory environment and minimise costs, industry is encouraged to self- or co-regulate, or seek alternatives in the form of voluntary agreements or market-driven solutions.
Thirdly, CEO notes an increase in stakeholder engagement and the use of consultations: stakeholder consultations, while open to others, in fact mean greater, earlier and more frequent opportunities for business to influence policy-making at European level.
Fourthly, under the REFIT, Regulatory Fitness and Performance programme, for exchanging information between the European Commission, member states and stakeholders and the ‘Fitness Check’ programme, rules already in place are verified by business to see whether they can be removed, simplified, or weakened with the aim to reduce costs for business.
CEO partly bases its analysis on the European Parliament’s investigatory committee’s provisional report on the car emissions fraud scandal (the EMIS committee), whose final version is due to be adopted on 28 February (see EUROPE 11711). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)