Gold-plating (European Union law)

Gold-plating is pejorative term to characterise the process where an EU directive is given additional powers when being transposed into the national laws of member states. In operational terms, the European Commission defines gold-plating "an excess of norms, guidelines and procedures accumulated at national, regional and local levels, which interfere with the expected policy goals to be achieved by such regulation".

Business lobbyists generally argue against it because additional regulation tends to raise costs for businesses, but there are the few companies that stand to benefit from it.

The UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills gave the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 as an example of gold-plated EU legislation, because it had granted temporary workers the right to performance-related bonuses, something that was not in the original EU law, which dealt with "the right to the same pay as permanent staff".

In Italy, gold-plating has often been used as a device to pass through controversial measures and to ensure a lower degree of parliamentary scrutiny, particularly in periods of weak government.

EU governments committed themselves to a deregulation agenda at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, and as a consequence the European Commission has supported more maximum harmonisation measures in recent years, which effectively prohibit gold-plating.

Within the UK, the 2010 coalition agreement included a pledge to end gold-plating; the original policy guidelines were finalised in June 2011. Specifically, they stipulate that all EU legislation be reviewed every five years by "all departments...to ensure that they are only implementing the absolute minimum regulation necessary to comply". Previously, a 2006 review of gold-plating by Lord Davidson QC found that some EU laws had indeed been "over-implemented", but he cautioned against "copying out the text of a directive".

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