Away with red tape!

The EU is often criticised — sometimes fairly — for the huge and costly rolls of red tape through which it requires people and businesses to cut, especially when trade and travel within what is supposed to be a single market is concerned.

It’s right, then, to give at least two cheers to a reform which from today will make life a little less irksome for 17m or so EU citizens who live in a union country other their own, and for the estimated 2m daily cross-border commuters who work or study in one country but live in another.

Until now, they have had to get and produce an official stamp that verifies the authenticity of vital documents, such as

birth, marriage, and death certificates. Today’s change abolishes that stamp and its associated — and tedious —bureaucratic processes. In many cases, there will be no longer a need to produce costly sworn translations.

There are, we are promised, robust fraud prevention safeguards, but this will be good news for people when it comes to working or getting married — and presumably divorced — in countries abroad but within the EU.

But why only two cheers? The changes were proposed by the European Commission in 2013. The EU moves slowly its wonders to perform.