Strasbourg, 25/10/2005 (Agence Europe) - In the context of its “Better Regulation” initiative of March this year (EUROPE 8911), the European Commission adopted a communication on Tuesday relating to the implementation of the Lisbon Programme - a strategy for simplification of the regulatory environment, establishing a three-year action programme for simplifying and updating the existing law. In the context of the partnership for growth and employment, the initiative essentially aims at reducing the administrative burden and the excessive number of regulations that are a great burden on companies. After broad consultation of Member States and parties involved, the Commission suggests repeal, codification, recasting and amending of 222 basic legislations and over 1,400 related legal acts within the next three years. Ensuring that the regulatory environment is simple and of excellent quality, the programme will be regularly updated and will first of all focus on the three most regulated sectors: the motor industry, construction and waste. The food products, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and services sectors will follow. The Commission's initiative is based on the following pillars:
- Repeal of irrelevant or obsolete legal acts. The Commission is intending to repeal about a dozen items of legislation, for example for classification of wood, defining the quality, knots and diameter of rough wood. In the automobile sector, 28 of the 56 Community directives governing the sector will be repealed and replaced by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) regulations. Also, to avoid obsolescence, the Commission hopes to introduce a clause for time limitation or a clause for revision in its legislative proposals.
- Codification of legislative texts. Codification greatly contributes to the reduction in volume of Community legislation, making legislative texts more readable and legally safe, thus facilitating their implementation. For example, in the field of cosmetics, the Commission hopes to codify Council Directive 76/768/EEC on cosmetic products, the seven subsequent amendments as well as 37 adaptations to technical progress directives being codified and simplified in one new directive. In the field of transport of dangerous goods, it intends to eliminate nearly 2,000 pages defining technical specifications from EU law. Also, the Commission intends to merge Directive 83/477/EEC on worker protection against the risk of exposure to asbestos at work and a series of legal acts dating back to before 1980 into a single directive. For state aid to agriculture, it hopes to simplify and reduce the 7 existing directives to 3 (exemption regulation, one set of guidelines and the de minimis regulation).
- Recasting with a view to clarifying and improving consistency. Recasting consists in simultaneously changing and codifying the legal acts concerned. Texts will then be merged to minimise duplication and redundancy and to increase the clarification and consistency of Community provisions. Thus, review of the 20 directive governing worker safety and security in the workplace will make it possible to harmonise the regularity of declarations and, where necessary, replace various reports with a single report on all aspects together. The Commission also hopes to recast legislative texts in the waste and construction material sectors in particular. It plans to tackle the administrative formalities relating to SMEs by simplifying the difficult statistic formulae and by meeting or modernising the customs code to facilitate electronic information sharing.
- Modification of the regulatory approach. Co-regulation is a method that is more advantageous and which has better cost-efficiency than the traditional legislative tools to meet certain political goals. In this context, the Commission plans to encourage voluntary agreements (after the fashion of that concluded by a consortium of polymer producers that voluntarily undertook this spring to employ environmentally-friendly polymers in the packaging sector and thus guarantee an effective standard of biodegradability for their products). It also plans to extend the standardisation of products in sensitive fields from the security point of view such as medical devices or cosmetics, machinery noise and emissions or health and safety at work or in services. Finally, the Commission hopes to use regulations to replace directives as tools for simplification.
Stressing, moreover, that a first analysis of the ongoing internet consultation shows that a good deal of public reaction relates to red tape in national or local rules rather than Community legislation, the Commission encourages Member States to integrate provisions on better regulation into their national reform programmes.
Günter Verheugen: one of the most important initiatives of this Commission
Explaining these new proposals during a press conference in Strasbourg, Günter Verheugen stressed their political importance saying he was convinced it would be one of the main initiatives of this Commission and that this “encouraging” approach would pay off. He said citizens have been broadly consulted on the Internet and that the positive psychological impact of the initiative is already being felt, seen in liaison with others, like that on modern industrial policy. Verheugen launched an “urgent appeal” to the other institutions and Member States, saying the responsibility for implementing the initiative does not just fall on the Commission “but also on you and we want to work closely with you”. He went on to assert that it would be an error to believe that this is “deregulation”, that we are back-pedalling when it comes to “acquis”, as we simply want to modernise it and make it more accessible and comprehensible. Regarding the methods used, Mr Verheugben cited codification (reducing volume without amending substance), “recasting” (combination between codification and modification, for example by gathering up the dispersed texts), withdrawal (in the case of outmoded provisions) and modification, which is the hardest exercise of all. Mr Verheugen recalled that the Commission's “new approach” provides, for example, for more frequent use of voluntary agreements rather than legislation, or to regulations (directly applicable) rather than directives.