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Austria and Italy launched a coalition against a specific kind of red tape this week — not the kind Brussels writes, but the kind capitals add on their own. The "Alliance for the Reduction of Bureaucratic Burden," unveiled in Brussels on 21 September by Austria's Secretary of State for Deregulation Sepp Schellhorn and Italy's Minister for Institutional Reforms Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, has since drawn support from at least seventeen member states, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. European Commissioner for Economy Valdis Dombrovskis attended the launch, and the participating governments plan to sign a joint declaration and hold regular exchanges on deregulation.
Their target has a name in EU jargon: gold-plating. The European Commission defines it as what happens when a member state, transposing an EU directive into national law, adds "a wider scope, stricter requirements or additional obligations beyond those contained in the original European legislation" — an extra reporting duty here, a more complicated licensing procedure there, layered on top of rules Brussels never asked for.
EPIC's July 2026 report on the Single Market, The Cost of Single Market Fragmentation, has spent months making a single point: Europe has measured what integration delivers and what dismantling it would cost, but never what completing it would actually gain. The Single Market generates an estimated €840 per citizen a year — roughly €427bn across the bloc, according to Mion and Ponattu's 2019 study — and EU GDP would be 8–9% lower without it, per in 't Veld's 2019 estimate. Completion-gain figures exist but disagree wildly by baseline: the European Parliamentary Research Service has put the prize at anywhere from €615bn to €1.1tn a year depending on the vintage and the assumptions, with a 2019 estimate crediting services alone with €297bn. EPIC's own central range — 4–5% of EU GDP — is flagged in the report as an inference, not a measurement.
What none of those figures isolate is the gold-plating layer. The Commission's own simplification programme, which the alliance's own literature invokes for context, targets a 25% cut in administrative burden for all firms and 35% for small and medium enterprises by the end of this Commission's mandate — but that programme measures compliance costs the EU itself created and has agreed to stop charging. It says nothing about what happens after a directive leaves Brussels and a national ministry adds its own conditions on the way to implementation. Reporting on the coalition's launch cited research putting the cost of Europe's internal trade barriers at the rough equivalent of a 44% tariff on goods and considerably more on services — a number nobody has yet decomposed into an EU-law share and a gold-plating share.
The alliance's own framing does some quiet work here. "Stricter requirements... beyond those contained in the original legislation" is a definition broad enough to catch two very different things: genuine bureaucratic bloat that serves no one, and a member state's deliberate choice to set a higher labour, environmental or consumer-protection standard than the EU floor requires. A country that adds real protections is not obviously in the same category as one that adds a redundant reporting form — but both look identical on the page as "gold-plating," and the coalition's joint declaration will need to draw that line before it can claim credit for removing only the first kind.
The seventeen-state coalition is, in effect, an admission that half of the EU's fragmentation problem was never Brussels' to fix. Cutting EU-level red tape — the Commission's 25% and 35% simplification targets — addresses only the layer the Union itself imposes; if member states re-impose a comparable burden on the way back down to their own economies, the net gain for businesses and citizens can vanish before it reaches them. For EPIC's own project of building a Cecchini-style number for what completing the Single Market would be worth, that is an argument for widening the next accounting exercise to include a national compliance layer that, on the evidence assembled so far, nobody has separately measured — which means every completion estimate published to date, EPIC's own included, may already be undercounting the prize.
