The EU admits its mistakes – but why only now?

The European Union is a regulatory superpower, but now it has started to reverse its course. On Wednesday, the commission promised to reduce the bureaucratic burden of environmental legislation on companies and farmers by one billion euros annually.

With the new proposal, the regulatory simplification measures presented by the Commission so far are expected to result in annual savings of around 11 billion euros.

The sum is so large that one has to ask who initially approved this jungle of bureaucracy that punishes companies.

The answer, of course, is the Commission, the Parliament and the member states, all of whom have influenced the content of the current laws too much without thinking about what kind of overall burden they cause for companies.

Finland and the prime minister Petteri Orpon In terms of environmental legislation, the government led by (kok) has been particularly concerned about the restoration regulation, the national costs of which can reach hundreds of millions of euros.

The Commission does not intend to open the previously approved regulation, but in Wednesday’s presentation, it promised to support the member states, take regional challenges into account and minimize the reporting burden.

For years, the EU has been criticized for stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. Most recently, the EU was criticized for excessive regulation in the US’s new national security strategy, where it was recalled that Europe’s share of world GDP has fallen from 25% in the 1990s to 14%.

How did it end up like this?

When the EU lagged behind the United States and China in economy and technology, it decided to be the best in something, namely regulation. It made Brussels a global standard setter, but at the same time Europe became a cradle of bureaucracy. Now the Commission is rushing to correct mistakes with its omnibus packages, and that’s fine. However, even in these lightening talks, the devil lies in the details, so Finnish companies have to read each amendment proposal with a magnifying glass, so as not to end up in a ditch while the proposal is being further processed in the parliament and member states.

At the same time, one cannot help but wonder why the legislators created, for example, the current bureaucratic burden for environmental legislation, which costs companies around one billion euros annually. Especially when the Commission assures that regulatory relaxations can be made in such a way that the state of the environment does not deteriorate.

The Commission’s overall goal is to achieve a total of 37.5 billion euros in annual administrative cost savings by 2029. That’s a huge amount of unnecessary burden that shouldn’t have been regulated in the first place.