Denmark’s opportunity to strengthen the EU's Better Regulation

The Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union started on July 1, 2025 and will last until December 31, 2025. The Danish Presidency’s programme briefly mentions a focus on simplification and “the need for better and simpler EU legislation.”

Topic-wise, it seems the Danes will put the most effort into simplification and better regulation only for agriculture: “The Presidency will organise a Council discussion on simplification and better regulation in the agriculture and food sector.”

However, the opportunities to reignite the debate on Europe’s Better regulation principles are vast, and go beyond the upcoming simplification omnibuses aimed at what are often cosmetic changes and minor burden reductions for European businesses. It has been four years since Better regulation guidelines have been adopted and it’s about time to evaluate what worked and what didn’t - both on the political and expert level.

What are better regulation principles, anyway? 

In essence, better regulation principles aim to help the EU create laws that meet their goals effectively, are easy to follow, and impose minimal burdens on businesses and individuals. The Commission supports this through evaluations, fitness checks, impact assessments, and transparent and inclusive stakeholder input.

According to the Commission’s website, better regulation principles help ensure that policymaking is evidence-based, impactful, and aligned with strategic priorities while keeping the regulatory environment simple, efficient, and business-friendly.  Cherry on top - better regulation principles must help ensure that the “regulatory environment is simple, effective, efficient, coherent” and “there is less red-tape and reporting in Europe to boost investments and competitiveness”. 

Room for improvement: review of the Better regulation guidelines

First area that needs urgent attention - the review of the Better Regulation guidelines. Adopted in 2021, these guidelines set out the EU’s approach to better regulation practices and its overall modus operandi. Four years on, it is clear that the exemptions from adhering to the Better Regulation principles have been used far too often.

Page 4, Chapter I, Box 1 lists these exemptions:

“In some cases, it may not be possible or appropriate to follow each step in the guidelines. For instance, there may be a political imperative to move ahead quickly, an emergency that requires a rapid response, a need to meet specific deadlines in legislation that cannot be met based on normal planning, or a need to protect security-related or confidential information.”

The guidelines further explain:

“Exemption from the guidelines can be requested at the point of political validation (via the planning module of Decide) or, for cases arising after validation, requests for exemption should be sent to the ‘better regulation’ unit in the Secretariat-General. The following functional mailbox should be used for such requests: SG-BETTER-REGULATION-EXCEPTIONS@ec.europa.eu.”

The scope of these reasons is far too broad -  “political imperative to move ahead quickly” could cover almost the entire European Commission agenda, “emergency that requires a rapid response” is similarly vague, and “a need to meet specific deadlines in legislation that cannot be met based on normal planning” leaves excessive room for interpretation.

The Danish Presidency could make a valuable contribution to Better Regulation principles by organising ministerial discussions on Member States’ and businesses’ feedback regarding these guidelines and presenting concrete proposals and recommendations to the Commission. It would also be useful to see aggregated data on how many times these exemptions have been applied over the past four years (it should be easily trackable via email provided in the guidelines). 

Need for timely, and clear feedback results

The second area of attention should be the consultation process in preparing legislation, with more detailed commentary on public consultation feedback. While it’s true that the EU’s stakeholder consultation system is open to many individuals and companies, aggregated results are rarely (never?) published promptly, leaving the public unsure if their input was considered. The Commission’s explanations of which proposals were accepted - and why - are usually limited to brief press comments, allowing scope for selective use before drafting legislative documents.

With AI now available and making all work much easier, the Danish Presidency and the Commission should improve the Have Your Say platform to aggregate feedback so the public can see which arguments were made, how widely they were supported, and by whom. The specific area to look at and review is in the guidelines’page 20, “5.2. Phase 2 — Conducting the consultation work”, which can be improved that the the immediate summary of contributions should not only be factual (e.g. how many contributions have been received, from which countries), but also what issues were raised and how many people or organizations have supported one idea or another. 

Time for methodologically honest questionnaries and polls

Third area of attention - regular review of consultation questionnaires. It is no secret that methodologically questionable polls have been on the rise in Europe, both in the public and private sectors. Charged or one-sided questions designed to extract only the answers the poll owner wants have, unfortunately, become the norm.

The Danish Presidency should consider gathering feedback from Europeans on their experiences with Have Your Say consultations in recent years and explore ways to improve the culture of polling, raising the bar for both the public and private sectors.

A push for European competitiveness and better regulation

There are more areas that require attention, such as how often the “one in - one out” principle (“whereby the Commission offsets new burdens imposed on individuals or businesses as a result of its proposals”), has been applied (or not) and why, as well as the quantitative results of the administrative burden created by each piece of legislation.

To truly improve European competitiveness, much more needs to be done to track and analyse data on how much burden is created, where, and by whom. My home country, Lithuania, has an imperfect but functioning administrative burden tracking system of this kind.

The application of Better Regulation principles and reducing administrative burden should be treated as a work in progress, and sufficient political attention could help the system improve, later contributing to improving political culture in the EU, increasing transparency, reducing unnecessary burdens for European businesses, and ensuring the potential impact of new proposals is carefully considered rather than rushed in each case.

All elements are essential to building trust in the EU's institutions and helping Europe become more globally competitive.