Brussels, 01/10/2001 (Agence Europe) - The European market-led standardisation model provides the regulatory flexibility the EU needs to keep pace with technological change, encourage innovative entrepreneurs, sustain the internal market's vitality, and duly protect the environment and consumer interests, states a new report on European standardisation. The report was presented to EU internal market ministers by Enterprise and Information Society Commission Erkki Liikanen on 27 September. It stresses that the European standardisation bodies, the CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, have made great progress not only in stepping up their output of new standards but also by cutting the cost for standardisation procedures in areas where harmonised standards offer a presumption of conformity with requirements of single market directives. This considerably facilitates business on the single market. In addition to construction product standards, for which promising results have been recorded (the first harmonised norms for cement were established this year), the other products benefiting from this system include toys, pleasure boats, pressure vessels, medical devices and individual protective equipment.
Over 2600 common European standards have been agreed over the past 18 months. Many of them are based on international standards, mainly in the electrotechnical field. The strong link between European and international standardisation helps European companies to gain access to markets abroad. Furthermore, thanks to the vast programme of harmonised standards produced by the European standards organisations, doing business has become much easier on the European single market. The report presented to the Internal Market Council also sets standardisation in the broader context of recent EU policy initiatives on electronic commerce, product safety and environmental protection. The new areas in which European standards have much to offer are general product safety and integrated product policy. The DG on Enterprise at the European Commission is currently consulting the parties interested as well as the general public on a proposal aimed at harmonising requirements relating to the environmentally-friendly design of electrical and electronic equipment (EEE).
In a context of fast developing new technologies, the European standards organisations have developed new types of specifications and services. If asked by market players, these "new deliverables" can be quickly developed on Internet-based platforms for consensus building. In some instances such new documents are already drafted in less than a year. On-line working methods are now being used in all three European standards organisations, and this is likely to increase the efficiency of the standardisation process. Experts will devote less time and money to travelling to and from technical committee meetings and this is expected to shorten the average time taken to produce a standard (although this varies from sector to sector). At the present time, it takes up to 18 months to adopt a European standard in the electrotechnical field, which is too long for high-tech fields, including telecommunications. Even for more "mature", traditional sectors, where a broad consensus of many different social groups has been achieved (small and medium-sized enterprises, consumers, stakeholders and representatives working on environmental, employment and health and safety issues), standards need to be produced faster. Finally, the Commission specifies that over 90% of the costs of standardisation are borne by market players. The CEN, for example, considers that EUR 700 million are invested each year in the work of European standardisation, including costs linked to the work of several hundred thousand private experts drawing up the standards. For further information:
http: //europa.eu.int/comm/engterprise/standards_policy/index.htm