Prodi: leading move

Brussels is appealing to MEPs and EU member states to work together to simplify "complex and costly" European legislation.

European Commission president, Romano Prodi, has today unveiled plans to cut the volume of European legislation by over a third in the next four years.

"[We are] committed to simplifying legislation, in order to both reduce the cost and complexity of doing business in Europe and to make the EU more comprehensible for its citizens," he said on Tuesday.

"This is only the first step. I am convinced that through a determined and consolidation and codification effort, we can cut back tens of thousands of pages of outdated legal texts."

Action to "codify" the EU's bulky acquis - a document that contains 97,000 pages of European laws - could see 35,000 pages of superfluous wording or rules slashed.

But the move will only get the go-ahead if Europe's often fractious 15 nations cooperate.

The commission itself can drop 1000 pages of laws that have originated from Brussels but will require cooperation from national governments, represented on Europe's councils of ministers, and the European parliament to handle the bulk of the rationalisation.

Officials are concerned that some will use attempts to redraft laws - a process that requires legislative "inter-institutional approval" - to resurrect old disagreements.

The complexity and length of EU directives is often as much a political matter as a technical one with differences between European countries and groupings in the European parliament leading to delayed agreement and tortuous legal texts.

Reworked laws might be more comprehensible for business and European citizens but will first need the approval of EU countries, MEPs and sometimes new national legislation: a process that the European Commission fears may reopen decades-old rifts over contentious directives.

"Too often in the past codification proposals have got seized and in the negotiations old issues are being revived so that everything stops," said a commission spokesman.

"We really have to get our act together so when we make a codification it doesn't languish or get ambushed by others who want to renegotiate things, it is sped through."

But the commission hopes that the political consensus can be found to streamline and speed up the process without getting bogged down in ancient euro-squabbles.

"I think there is a broad political will to make progress but it always can stumble," said the Brussels spokesman.

"That's something we have got to watch. I think there is a better chance now in the current climate to avoid that sort of wrangling but not to avoid it altogether."