Mr Clegg – economical with the truth

David Green, 27 March 2014

In the debate between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg, Mr Clegg insisted that only 7% of laws and regulations stemmed from the EU and he insisted that a study by the House of Commons Library backed him up. If he was referring to this report, then his claim is incorrect. After carefully explaining all the complications, the Library report concludes that “it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts”. Here is the full quotation:

“EU regulations, unlike directives, are not usually transposed into legislation at national level, but rather into quasi-legislative measures, administrative rules, regulations or procedures etc which do not pass through a national parliamentary process. How, then, can one be worked out as a proportion of the other? The term ‘national obligation’ might be more appropriate, but is it possible to identify the sum of national obligations arising from EU laws? Increasing use of regulations, particularly Commission regulations, “decouples national transposition procedures” (Christensen), thereby increasing the unquantifiable element of EU activity. All measurements have their problems. To exclude EU regulations from the calculation is likely to be an under-estimation of the proportion of EU-based national laws, while to include all EU regulations in the calculation is probably an over-estimation. The answer in numerical terms lies somewhere in between the two approaches, and it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts. Other EU ‘soft law’ measures under the Open Method of Coordination are difficult to quantify as they often take the form of objectives and common targets. Analyses rarely look into EU soft law, the role of EU standard setting or self-regulatory measures.”