Simplification: a Long Tradition that has Failed to Reduce the EU Acquis

The ‘Omnibus’ simplification programme on which the von der Leyen II Commission has embarked is part of a long tradition. It dates back to at least the SLIM programme of the 1990s and has been relaunched by every Commission president (Prodi, Barroso, Juncker and von der Leyen I) since. While regulatory complexity and simplification can be measured according to several criteria, it can be expected that, all else being equal, simpler regulation is at least less voluminous than more complex regulation. The Commission also regularly argued for the repeal of legislation and for the reduction of the EU acquis. However, a simple look at the Official Journal shows that the volume of EU regulation has continued to grow throughout all simplification programmes: the OJ’s annual page count is now six times what it was in the 1990s. The number and length of the Commission’s own legislative proposals seem to contribute to this.