Britain is being swamped by 8 new pieces of legislation from Brussels every day according to a fresh analysis of EU output by the U.K. Independence Party.
A report from the U.K. Independence Party on the flood of legislation from Brussels reveals that between 1st May 2008 and 30th April 2009, Brussels introduced 2754 pieces of legislation, the equivalent of just under 8 per day. The total included 103 new directives, 1331 new regulations, 921 Commission decisions which had legislative effect and a further 409 other legislative instruments.
EU Commissioner Gunther Verheugen estimated in 2006 that the cost of EU regulation on economies Europe wide was around £581bn, the equivalent of the total economy of a medium sized European nation.
UKIP Leader Nigel Farage said, “We in Britain are being swamped by this torrent of legislation, while our parliament at Westminster is powerless to alter a single word of it. We can't reject any of these laws, we can't change any of them and MPs never bother to read most of them. But we do have to obey all of these laws made for us by Brussels. It's an outrage and we have to get out of this system so that we can once again have British laws for the British peopl
e."
"While the outcome of today's vote on industrial pollution could have been even worse, sadly MEPs have voted to let some of the most polluting industries off the hook. Lobbying from oil, steel and chemical industry laggards unfortunately succeeded in duping a narrow majority of MEPs to support a last minute amendment.
"As a result, the EP has voted to exclude most of the manufacturing industry from the air quality limit values set out in the legislation for large combustion plants (1). This last minute amendment is blatantly against the aims and objectives of the directive, goes against a recent European Court of Justice ruling (2), and therefore I urge the Council and the Commission to ignore it.
South East MEP Dr Lucas continued: "However, while some of the provisions of the proposed directive have been weakened, the compromise agreed between groups contains a number of improvements, notably the establishment of a procedure to set EU-level limit values for specific sectors in addition to the ones already set in the Directive. Monitoring and inspection requirements have been improved. This sends a clear message that environmental dumping between Member States should not be tolerated and installations with clean track records should be rewarded.
"Thankfully, EPP amendments seeking to delete soil and groundwater monitoring and reporting requirements - as well as obligations for site restoration after closure - were rejected. Removing minimum requirements on these areas would have been irresponsible and would have encouraged a race to the bottom in national/local implementation.
"But regrettably, MEPs have agreed to constrain their own right of amendment on so-called recast proposals. Today this resulted in the President of the Parliament denying MEPs the possibility to vote for setting CO2 emission performance standards for large combustion plants, despite the fact that such measures are sorely needed to guard against investments into fossil combustion infrastructure which are incompatible with EU climate policy."
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