The European Union thought it was making life easier for business when it announced plans to slash EU bureaucracy.

But 20 months into its red-tape slashing bonanza, many businesses are simply not impressed.

POLITICO spoke to 17 companies, consultancies and industry associations across sectors who expressed discontent over how the EU is going about its “simplification” drive. They say it is too slow, expensive and complicated — and question whether an institution set up to write laws can effectively undo them.

The EU is “hardwired” to create new rules but “is far less capable of removing the obstacles that hinder industrial competitiveness,” said Richard Longden, head of group communications at the chemical manufacturer INEOS — a sentiment echoed by several other interviewees.

The disillusionment is a far cry from November 2024, when Ursula von der Leyen stood before the European Parliament to announce a new dawn for the EU, cheered on by industry.

“We need to streamline our rules to reduce the burden on businesses. And we need to give legal certainty about what we expect from them,” the European Commission president told MEPs at the time, in a direct response to industry’s unified call for lighter-touch regulation in Antwerp the previous February.

Over the following months, the Commission produced a steady stream of policy proposals designed to simplify the EU’s rulebook and free up Europe’s sluggish economy so it could compete with the industrial powerhouses of China and the U.S.

But now, companies say that the bonfire of red tape they asked for is weak, costly, confusing and at times misguided. That criticism, justified or not, shows Europe’s industries are increasingly frustrated with the Brussels way of doing things: writing new laws to undo other laws.

“The sense of urgency is present in the Berlaymont, but too many policymakers in the corridors of the [Commission departments], in the European Parliament and in national ministries still believe we can regulate Europe into competitiveness,” said Peter Lochbihler, global head of public affairs at Booking Holdings, which owns booking.com.

For years, European businesses have complained that EU rules are choking them by forcing them to spend time filling out paperwork to comply rather than doing business, making money, and creating jobs.

Emboldened by Mario Draghi’s landmark instructions on how to revive the European economy, they asked Brussels to follow his advice and lighten the regulatory load to help them compete with U.S. and Chinese rivals.

Since February 2025, the Commission has been doing just that. It came up with a dozen proposals to slash red tape in areas of EU law such as defense, energy, chemicals, tech and agriculture. 

Although they recognize the efforts made by Brussels to shift its focus to competitiveness, companies say they are not yet benefiting from those solutions because it takes months, if not years, for decisions taken in Brussels to materialize across the EU economy.

“I very much believe that they have the small and medium-sized enterprises in mind, but the way they are tackling the problem is not really helping,” said Till Blässinger, who owns the German engineering SME Blässinger group.

“Do I feel an easing [of the regulatory burden]? No,” he said — though he added the Commission was going in “the right direction” with its simplification drive.

EU decision-makers, meanwhile, are desperate to find the balance between industry calls for fewer rules and repeated warnings from scientists and civil society that the simplification drive will harm European citizens’ health and the environment on which the EU’s economy and food systems rely.

The tug-of-war speaks to broader concerns over whether the EU’s ponderous decision-making machine is equipped to address the complex geopolitical, economic, and climate crises that threaten to push the continent into decline.

The need for speed 

The Commission has proposed 12 legal bills to reopen existing laws and scrap requirements seen as overly burdensome, promising billions in savings.

These so-called omnibus packages address companies’ long-standing demand to cut reporting obligations on emissions, environmental impacts, chemicals, supply chains, data privacy and more. Businesses say overlapping laws often force them to report the same information multiple times.

Brussels now has an army of civil servants and diplomats rushing to get the job done. And although the number of simplification files is stacking up on their desk, companies say they need to go faster and make deeper cuts. 

That’s partly because agreements to simplify some aspects of EU regulation are only just being integrated in national law. “SMEs cannot feel the effects yet. The cycle is still ongoing with the first omnibus now landing at national level. This is why the frustration is still so high,” said Véronique Willems, secretary general of SMEUnited.

To boost economic growth, “more decisive and faster decisions are required, and also way faster adoption by all [EU] members once passed,” said Joakim Sjöblom, CEO of Swebal, a Swedish TNT startup.  

But the EU’s notoriously bureaucratic and multi-layered power structure is getting in the way, some argue. 

For example, the Commission’s proposal to ease pesticides rules is a “fantastic intermediate step” but isn’t enough to promote innovation in the sector, said Eva Van Hende, head of regulatory and sustainability at the Belgian bio-pesticides startup Biotalys.

The plan to cut all this red tape is a “stress test” for the Commission, said Alexis Van Maercke, director general of the industry group Detergents Europe. “By nature, the omnibus involves a lot of services, different [departments], different units. It’s quite a complex exercise for them,” he said, noting that it “takes time to get member states on board [and] to craft majorities.”

A spokesperson for the Commission told POLITICO that its simplification proposals “have not been built in isolation but are the result of intense ongoing work across Commission services to identify overlap, eliminate redundant measures, and remove inefficient provisions.”

The Commission agrees that European industry “faces a range of challenges,” the spokesperson said, adding it had already made “unprecedented” progress in its simplification drive.

Too much talking 

Many of the industries POLITICO spoke to said that some of the Commission’s ideas on how to simplify laws are getting derailed during negotiations with the European Parliament and member countries, which have joint power to amend, pass and block EU legislation.

“We are concerned that the simplification ambition tends to erode during the legislative process,” said Thibault Pivetta, general secretary at the European Mollusc Producers Association, which represents shellfish farmers across the bloc. The negotiations showed a “tendency to add conditionality and reporting requirements rather than removing them,” he added. 

With the proposal to ease data rules, for example, business associations have complained that diplomats are gutting “the most critical simplification measures” from the Commission’s text, which they say will make life more difficult for industry, not easier.

Companies made similar statements on the proposal to ease environmental planning rules and a recently adopted simplification package on chemicals.

Martynas Barysas, internal market director at BusinessEurope — the largest industry lobby in Brussels — said that “instructions on further regulatory burden reduction for companies are drowning in the inertia of working-level discussions.” 

That criticism has been relayed by Commission officials to national delegations and MEPs on several occasions, as Brussels shifts the blame for regulatory burden onto capitals that don’t implement EU rules properly.  

Deregulation risk 

Negotiations between the Commission, EU governments and lawmakers have been the hardest for files where countries see a genuine risk that undoing EU laws could harm Europeans’ health, privacy, or access to a clean environment.  

It’s forcing the EU, its decision-makers and companies to reckon with inherent tensions between the bloc’s competitiveness and green goals. The Commission has received lots of criticism for suggesting that water rules should be reviewed to ease restrictions on mining projects, for instance.

Several of the companies and industries that POLITICO spoke to, including French water and recycling company Véolia, warned that simplification “should not be used as a vehicle to weaken and repeal the essential texts of the Green Deal” from the last mandate. 

Introducing new rules for companies, only to review them a few months later, could also make the EU an unpredictable place to do business, some say. 

Last year, for example, businesses complained about the introduction, pausing and rewriting of anti-deforestation rules, which they said was making life more complicated. “We are all in favor of simplification if it happens well in advance and if it’s well communicated,” said Bart Vandewaetere, head of government relations and ESG engagement at Nestlé.

“When we look at the simplification, it is mainly files, let’s face it, that have to do with the transition of society and of industry to more sustainable approaches,” he added.

Some industries are now calling for a pause on new laws to give the economy time to implement all the changes. “After that simplification wave, what we need is a predictability wave,” said Van Maercke from Detergents Europe, “so that we have five to 10 years to really work on it and implement everything.” 

Others say Brussels’ red-tape bonfire is only scratching the surface and that the roots of Europe’s competitiveness problem run much deeper. “The real issues are energy costs and carbon taxes that make European manufacturing fundamentally uncompetitive,” said INEOS’ Longden.  

“Until those are fixed, imports will continue to flow into Europe, and investment will continue to flow to the US and China,” he added. 

Jakob Weizman, Leonie Cater, Aude van den Hove, Ellen O’ Regan, Ketrin Jochecová and Victor Jack contributed reporting.

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