European Transparency Initiative COM (2006) 194 final

Orgalime response to the Green Paper

Orgalime welcomes the Commission’s Green Paper on the “European Transparency Initiative” and the opportunity to provide our comments on this paper. We welcome the increasing transparency in the work of the institutions and the efforts being made by the different Directorates General to consult stakeholders across the board before issuing a policy or a proposal.

We believe that the Commission’s standards of consultation have improved markedly in recent years, although we remain concerned that consultation procedures are still often neither simple enough, nor targeted enough. We comment hereafter in greater detail on this issue and on the issue of transparency in the answers we provide to the Commission’s questions.

As a trade association, Orgalime consistently represents the collective interests of engineering companies, the vast majority of which are SMEs, which would otherwise find it difficult to make their views known at an EU level. We have for over 50 years participated in the development of the regulatory framework in the EU and collaborate on a daily basis with the institutions from the preliminary stages of consultation, through the regulatory process and thereafter in the implementation phase.