By Chris Jones - 25th September 2005
Enterprise Commissioner Gunter Verheugen will on Tuesday publish a list of 77 draft EU regulations to be scrapped or reworked.
The aim of the cull is to ensure that the EU’s legislation is more tightly focused on competitiveness – a key priority of the José Manuel Barroso’s agenda.
A large number of the proposals to be scrapped concern relations with the ten new member states prior to the enlargement of the EU in May 2004, and as such are now largely obsolete.
Others, like the 1998 proposal to harmonise regulations governing weekend bans on heavy goods vehicles, need to be rethought to take account of ten new sets of national laws.
Delays in the legislative pipeline mean that others such as a 1997 proposal on the application of competition regulations to the air transport sector or a 2001 decision on the reconstitution of fish stocks, have either been superseded by more recent rules or become irrelevant.
In some cases, proposals are being withdrawn because the commission plans to put forward new legislation – as is the case with a 2002 proposal to establish a new taxation regime for diesel for professional uses and on narrowing the excise duty gap between petrol and diesel.
The commission has also highlighted five proposals that it suggests be maintained but subjected to further economic analysis, including two from 2003 on shipments of environmental waste and the emission of fluorinated gases, which the it believes can be reworked to reduce the regulatory burden on business without compromising environmental protection.
Three other proposals - on the regulation of sales promotions, the protection of inventions and the entry conditions for non-EU workers - are to be withdrawn but could be reinstated following impact assessments.
But some controversial regulations will not be among those to scrapped or reworked – notably the services directive that has led to fears of a flood of low-cost workers.
“We consider that the services directive will help stimulate growth and jobs, and that any amendments to its scope are best dealt with through the usual negotiations rather than by withdrawing the proposal and putting forward a new one,” a commission official said.
The commission’s assessment of which regulations to scrap included significant input from industry leaders on what they wanted from EU regulations, but officials denied that proposals had been watered down to pander to business interests.
“In the area of waste management, for example, there will be no compromise on the requirement for environmental protection safeguards, but this does not mean that the costs incurred by companies in this sector cannot be cut through better regulations,” the commission official said.
Verheugen will inform both national governments and the European Parliament about the proposed cuts under the inter-institutional agreement on better regulation, but the commission said it did not expect to negotiate on which proposals should be included in the list.
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