WRITTEN QUESTION E-1750/02

by Maria Sanders-ten Holte (ELDR)and Carles-Alfred Gasòliba i Böhm (ELDR) to the Commission

(19 June 2002)

Subject: Progress made on the consolidation work

For several years, the Commission has been outsourcing work on the consolidation of legal Community texts and their IT development through contracts awarded to external companies. To achieve its aim of introducing modifications into fundamental legislative acts and providing consolidated texts in the various language versions and in different electronic formats within the agreed deadlines, the Commission appears to have devised a reliable plan, which must be observed to avoid jeopardising its institutional commitments, such as improving accessibility to the acts for, among others, those countries that will be joining the European Union.

On page 1 of the notice for the most recent contract No 1999/S 250-206523, the Commission stipulates, for instance, that for the implementation of approximately 4 000 modifications more than 250 000 pages must be analysed by the contractor each year during the first three years (after which a reduction in the volume to be processed is envisaged).

1. Is the Commission satisfied with the progress made on the consolidation work and confident that it will achieve the abovementioned aims?

2. Could the Commission indicate the percentage of consolidated texts supplied each year by its various contractors in relation to the commitments undertaken?

3. Should the consolidation work fall behind schedule, does the Commission believe that it could still meet its objectives?

Answer given by Mr Prodi on behalf of the Commission

(10 July 2002)

1. The Commission has been in the process of producing and publishing a consolidated version of its legislation for a number of years and has fixed mid-2003 as the deadline for the completion of this task, to which it attaches great importance as it is one of the ways of making Community legislation more readable and more accessible to its citizens. Once the consolidation of existing legislation has been completed a task which has been outsoured to a subcontractor the scale of consolidation work will be reduced, involving simply the incorporation into existing consolidated acts of the amendments made to them by the legislator as and when they are adopted.

By the end of 1998 approximately 400 acts had been consolidated, wholly or in part. At the present time 1 282 out of a total of 2 288 acts are available on Eurlex of which 1 188 are up-to-date consolidations.

Of the remaining 1 100 acts which are still to be consolidated in whole or in part, 733 are currently in production. It is expected that the number of up-to-date consolidated acts available by the end of 2002 will rise to about 1 800.

The Commission is therefore confident that the consolidation process can be completed on schedule. It should, however, be stressed that the process relates to the existing 11 official languages and that with any new accession further, as yet unquantified, efforts will need to be made to publish the legislation in any new language(s) in consolidated form.

2. At present there is one subcontractor contracted to carry out consolidation work. The subcontractor produces an average of 12 000 pages of consolidated text per week i.e. some 555 000 pages a year. This amounts to approximately one-third of the total number of pages which need to be produced to consolidate the backlog, thus corresponding to the three-year period culminating in the final mid-2003 deadline.

Once the backlog has been consolidated, consolidation of day-to-day amendments will correspond to between one-quarter and one-third of the present annual volumes.

3. The Commission does not expect consolidation work to fall behind schedule, but if this should occur preference is given to the consolidation of those acts which are currently being amended by the legislator over acts which merely form part of the non-consolidated backlog.