The Monster of European Law - Just How Big is the Acquis Communautaire?

Politicians have asserted for years that the EU’s acquis communautaire the body of EU legislation which European companies, charities and individuals have to comply with - is roughly 80,000 pages long.

• However, new research by Open Europe suggests that such estimates are seriously out of date. A huge increase in the burden of EU regulation over the last ten years is now visible even in the physical volume of EU legislation.

• By totalling up pages in the many volumes of the EU’s Official Journal of legislation we found that the EU has passed a staggering 666,879 pages of law since its inception in 1957.

• From the EU’s legislative database – Eur-lex – we were able to ascertain that 26% of all EU regulations passed since 1957 are still active. Thus we calculate that the true size of the active acquis communautaire is over 170,000 pages long. This is more than double the number of pages that is normally claimed by the EU Commission and other commentators.

• Of these 170,000, over 100,000 have been produced in the last ten years. This rapid expansion shows no sign of abating. If the EU continues to legislate at current trends the acquis communautaire will have more than doubled by 2020 to 351,000 pages.

• If all the legislation the EU has passed were laid out lengthways it would be over 120 miles long. Along the M1 it would stretch from London all the way past Nottingham. Even if we just account for the amount of EU legislation currently in force, at 31.7 miles it stretches even further than a marathon and would take the average person more than four hours to run along.

• The total amount of legislation passed since the start of the EU would be nearly as tall as Nelson’s column – 43.8 metres to Nelson’s 46m. Even if you were to stack just the 170,000 pages of currently active legislation on top of each other they would reach over 11 metres (36 feet) tall – over twice the height of one of London’s old Routemaster double-decker buses, which stood at 4.3 metres (over 29 feet) tall.

• The weight of the entire Official Journal is over a tonne – equivalent to the size of a small whale or rhinoceros. The total weight of the parts of the
Official Journal that are currently in force is 285 kg.

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