Meeting on 9 March 2007 for the European Spring Summit, leaders of the EU's 27 member states agreed to the Commission's proposed goal of cutting Community red tape by 25% before 2012.
But they discarded the idea of setting binding targets at national level, despite the fact that national bureaucracy accounts for around half of the bloc's administrative costs.
Instead, they opted for a softer text, which states that the European Council "invites" member states to set "their own national targets of comparable ambition" by 2008, "taking into account the different starting points and traditions".
A number of countries had been worried about the high costs of actually measuring administrative burdens related to existing and new regulations at national level.
Other than this decision on improving regulation, no other real commitments, as regards Europe's growth and jobs strategy, came out of the Summit, which instead saw leaders congratulating each other on the recent EU economic upswing.
Leaders also stressed the importance of deepening the internal market, by better enforcing the mutual-recognition principle for goods and fully transposing the Services Directive.
