A brief history of the (failed) attempts to simplify EU legislation

In its 2025 Competitiveness Compass, the European Commission announced that it ‘will deliver an unprecedented simplification effort’. This paper shows that this announcement is by no means unprecedented and is, in fact, part of a very long history of attempts to simplify EU legislation. The paper uses Commission policy documents to trace back these efforts to 1996, when the Commission launched the ‘Simpler Legislation for the Internal Market’ pilot project. This was followed by the 2002 Action Plan aimed at ‘simplifying the body of Community law and reducing its volume’, the 2006 strategy for administrative burden reduction, the 2012 Regulatory Fitness programme (REFIT) announcing further simplification and burden reduction, the 2014 REFIT Scoreboard, the 2018 Annual Burden Survey, and the 2021 One In One Out approach. Next, the paper shows that these measures have been largely unsuccessful or at least ineffective. Whilst progress may have been achieved in certain pockets of EU law, the volume of EU rules has continued to grow: the Official Journal of the European Union counted 350,000 pages in 1995, but by 2023, this had grown to more than 2 million pages. This is not only due to modifications made by the Council and Parliament to legislative proposals from the Commission: the volume of the Commission’s own proposals has also more than doubled between the Prodi Commission (1999-2004) and the Von der Leyen I Commission (2019-2024). As a tentative explanation for the failure to stem the proliferation of legislative provisions, the paper points to some aspects of the Better Regulation toolbox, such as extensive impact assessments and the reliance on (procedures of) co-regulation. Whilst these may have improved the intrinsic quality of the legislation, they may also have made the legislation increasingly more complex. Paradoxically, this could actually have made compliance and enforcement more difficult.