Simplifying legislation and reducing the administrative burden have been buzzwords for the European Commission for some time now. But has the European Council, made up of ministers from the Member States, finally lost the plot?
Maintaining Europe's competitiveness in a global marketplace is clearly important and industry is always the first to say that we have the strictest regulatory framework on environment in the world. But isn't that a positive? That's what Europe is all about. Clearly the industry lobby sees the recession as a good opportunity to ditch legislation they don't want to comply with.
While still referring to the Sustainable Consumption and Production Action Plan and in line with the recommendations of the High Level Group on the Competitiveness of the Chemical Industry, the Council is expected today to issue conclusions which may weaken REACH.
We keep calling on industry not to abandon their sustainability objectives in the recession and yet policymakers appear ready to water down legislation which was fought over for years because of the downturn. This is only the beginning of the recession. Will we have thrown all environment and health legislation out of the window by the time it's over?
No comments:
Post a Comment