Internal battle delays bid to cut red tape

Date: 10/04/1997

By Chris Johnstone

AN INTERNAL battle is being waged within the European Commission over plans to expand a key programme to cut red tape and simplify EU legislation.

Officials from Commissioner Martin Bangemann's Directorate-General for industry (DGIII) have angered their single market counterparts by trying to put a brake on the extension of the SLIM (Simpler Legislation for the Internal Market) programme to new areas.

SLIM is one of the showcase projects of the Directorate-General for the single market (DGXV). Its Commissioner, Mario Monti, has already set out his ambitions for an expanded follow-up programme and does not appear willing to back down.

But Bangemann's officials are opposed to Monti's plan for fresh SLIM action focusing on specific industrial sectors where the rules can be simplified.

They say it “does not make sense” to turn to new fields when work on tidying up the rules and setting the foundations for a single market in the construction sector - one of SLIM's first priorities - is still far from complete.

But officials concede that action in other areas could be considered as long as it did not detract from work on construction.

Some governments would, however, jump at the idea of highlighting new sectors as a way of diverting Commission attention from the building industry, a key area where national companies still enjoy virtual monopolies because of a jungle of local standards.

Monti's aides do not dispute that the results of attempts to break down barriers to a single market in the construction sector have been disappointing, but they resent any moves to slow down a programme which has already won the support of national governments and the Commission. Some are interpreting obstruction from Bangemann's directorate-general as the traditional defensive reaction of bureaucrats whose patch is being encroached upon.

Creating some order out of the myriad of national rules in the building trade has been a major headache for the Commission.

It has been reluctant to impose harmonised EU standards because of the sheer complexity of the task and likelihood of offending national governments. On the other hand, mutual recognition of national standards, the formula used for so much of the internal market, would leave too many barriers in place.

Some of the burden has been unloaded on to the standards setting body CEN, the European Committee for Standardisation.

Unfortunately, the goalposts have been moved since it started its work in 1995 and it must now review many of the regulations already produced so that they can be published as harmonised standards in the Commission's Official Journal.

CEN has around 50 technical committees working on norms in the building and civil engineering sector.

At the end of June last year, it had produced 416 standards, with work continuing on another 1,816.