Anna-Lena Bohm, chair of the Swedish Better Regulation Council, headed the RegWatchEurope (RWE) delegation who met the vice president of the European Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, and members of his Cabinet on May 22 to discuss current topics related to the legislative process of the EU, including political commitments to a growth enhancing regulatory framework recently made in the Communication on long-term Competitiveness.
RWE welcomed initiatives and commitments from the European Commission to simplify legislation and reduce regulatory burdens, but underlined the importance of not only setting reduction targets for limited reporting burdens, or just administrative burdens, but to all compliance costs. Mr Šefčovič shared in principle this view.
RWE raised its concerns about the absence of impact assessments at EU level for several recent major legislative proposals, due to stated emergency as the absence of impact assessment risks leading to less informed and prolonged negotiations and to non-optimal legislation.
It also creates additional burden on Member States, both during the negotiation phase and at the transposition and implementation phases. The possibility of establishing a fast-track procedure, to be used extraordinarily, was discussed at the meeting.
Problems related to the transposition and implementation of EU legislation in Member States, leading to unnecessary burdens, were also highlighted. There seemed to be a shared view of the need for increased focus on ex post evaluation and the arrangement of regular transposition/implementation workshops were put forward as a way to contribute to this objective.
