16 October 2006

FT: Executives say EU rules outweigh benefits

Most chief executives of UK businesses want Britain to renegotiate its membership of the European Union and take back powers from Brussels, the biggest survey of its kind for years found. The increasing burden of EU legislation was seen by the majority of 1,000 chief executives polled by ICM as outweighing the benefits of the single market, even among businesses that did the most trade with the EU. Chief executives who said they distrusted the European Commission outnumbered those who said they trusted the Brussels bureaucracy by more than two to one. Only the European Court of Justice achieved a positive trust score among the EU institutions.

The survey was commissioned by Open Europe, a UK business-backed think-tank that lobbies to turn the EU into a looser trading area, and was born out of the anti-euro No campaign. The businesses questioned by ICM included a range of sizes, with a quarter employing more than 250 and a quarter employing four or fewer.

Larger businesses tended to be less sceptical about the EU but still showed much disenchantment. While 60% of chief executives overall wanted the UK to renegotiate membership of the EU, support for renegotiation among those from the larger companies was 52%.

Concern over EU legislation was greater among chief executives of the bigger businesses, with 70% who thought regulation was increasing, compared with 59% for the survey as a whole. The survey comes a week after Günter Verheugen, EU enterprise commissioner, said his drive to simplify Brussels legislation had fallen behind schedule and that the business cost of complying with the regulations was up to € 600bn a year.

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© Financial Times