WRITTEN QUESTION E-1750/02 by Maria Sanders-ten Holte (ELDR)and Carles-Alfred Gasòliba i Böhm (ELDR) to the Commission. Progress made on the consolidation work.
Date: 2002-06-19
Institutions: European Parliament, Provisional data
Subjects: consolidation of EU law, invitation to tender

C 92 E/90

Official Journal of the European Union

EN

17.4.2003

(2003/C 92 E/092)

WRITTEN QUESTION E-1750/02

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

Subject: Progress made on the consolidation work

(19 June 2002)

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 (cid:1) more than 250 000
pages must be analysed (cid:1) by the contractor (cid:1) each year during the first three years (after which a
reduction in the volume to be processed is envisaged)’.

Is the Commission satisfied with the progress made on the consolidation work and confident that it

1.
will achieve the abovementioned aims?

Could the Commission indicate the percentage of consolidated texts supplied each year by its various

2.
contractors in relation to the commitments undertaken?

Should the consolidation work fall behind schedule, does the Commission believe that it could still

3.
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 (cid:1) a task which has been outsoured to a subcontractor (cid:1) 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.