Better regulation in the European Union

Calls for a strategy to improve the quality of the rules produced by the European Union (EU) date back to the early 1990s. During the last thirty years, this strategy has emerged in waves of ‘high quality regulation’ and ‘better regulation’. Since the early 2000s, this agenda has gradually taken its role in the EU policy process, especially at the stage of policy formulation (with the tools of consultation and impact assessment) and, in the last decade, with attempts to include other stages of policy process with tools for the retrospective review of legislaton and regulatory offsetting. Better regulation is an overall commitment binding the EU institution (with the inter-institutional agreement on better law-making agreed in 2016) 1 and the member states. The reality on the ground is that the Commission has deployed the tools of better regulation more intensively than the European Parliament and (even more so) the Council. Member states and the Commission are not always on the same page when it comes to the choice and specification of how to use the tools, and whether the political aim is to improve on regulatory quality or to reduce the quantity of rules. For all these nuances and political differences, today, better regulation is a formally endorsed working method of the European Commission (2019a). In the near future, the challenges concern the integration of foresight, the connection between different phases of the EU policy process (what in Commission’s parlance is known as ‘closing the policy cycle’, Mastenbroek et al. 2016), and policy coherence for sustainability. In this chapter, we outline the foundations of better regulation by reviewing the historical record tracing the main episodes. Specifically, we cover: the 1992 Edinburgh summit to the Mandelkern Report of 2001, the Prodi Commission’s package on regulatory reform, impact assessment and consultation, the dialogue between the Council and the Commission on setting targets for administrative burdens, the rise of regulatory oversight first with the Impact Assessment Board (2007) and then with the Regulatory Scrutiny Board (RSB), the Juncker-Timmermans vision for better regulation and the commitment to regulatory offsetting of the von der Leyden Commission. With the foundations laid, we finally explore what lies ahead.