When is it honourable to breach the rules?

Let's start with the European Agriculture Council that ought to observe the European Commission's (EC's) pledge to lift the burden on businesses.

The last-minute addition to the Food Information Regulation (FIR) requiring previously frozen food to be labelled as 'defrosted' effectively bypassed the normal opportunity for consultation of interested parties. This included experts at the EC who are well apprised as to the consequences and costs of the proposal and circumstances in which such labelling is unnecessary because the defrosted product is identical to the one before it was frozen.

It appears that one Member State proposed it and the rest, caught unawares, sleepwalked into it with little debate. They overlooked or ignored the fact that the FIR was intended to simplify existing labelling legislation, not add fresh burdens.

I wonder if Council members are aware of the EC's Action Programme for Reducing Administrative Burdens in the EU with the aim of reducing the burden by 25% by 2012.

It contains grandiose phrases such as "creating new opportunities for a prosperous, secure and sustainable Europe". It even identifies food safety as one of the priority areas ripe for simplification because it imposes the "most burdensome and irritating information obligations". Labelling is identified as one such "information obligation".

This pledge is empty if as soon as one irritating obligation is removed, another is added at the instigation of a different part of the machinery. Should the Council not have a responsibility to observe the Commission's aim or has it got a life of its own?

Of course, decisions by the European Council can only be as good as the officials who brief its members. The officials can only be as good as the information provided to them by the people who will be subject to the proposals in question. Without sufficient opportunity for this process, bad legislation may ensue by default and that is inexcusable.

In the 'defrosted' labelling case, the industry has secured support of MEPs on the Environment Committee who will propose amendments to ensure that the provision is debated at the next stage. But you cannot help but feel that the EU machinery is too complex and unwieldy with too many cooks, and approaching a tipping point where EC legislation will be honoured more in the breach than the observance. The true meaning of this phrase from Hamlet is not that the rules are more often broken than followed but that "it is more honourable to breach than to observe".

Clare Cheney is director general of the Provision Trade Federation.