Joint open letter on Industry Competitiveness and EU Standardisation

CECIMO, along with seventeen other associations signed the open letter on Industry Competitiveness and EU Standardisation.

The co-signatories, representing businesses from a variety of sectors in Europe, invite the EU Council Presidency to urgently address the following issues:

• consider the issue of harmonised standardisation as inseparable from the revision of the Industrial Strategy for Europe and the evaluation of the NLF for products ;
• demand the Commission to stop treating harmonised standards as part of EU law, when not explicitly referred to as such in the sectoral legal acts, as this contradicts the well-established NLF principles ;
• call on the Commission to re-establish the standardisation processes which have worked as a successful model under the NLF for many years, with the right balance of participation in the process from the Commission, Member States, European standardisation organisations and stakeholders ;
• suggest this opportunity to the Commission to adjust the approach in the upcoming Standardisation and/or renewed Industrial Strategy, and subsequently in the standardisation procedures which should be geared towards enabling innovation and its market uptake, so that Europe proves the global leadership;
• always prioritise the well-established NLF route of the consensus-based harmonised standards over technical specifications in delegated or implementing acts.

All the signatories highlight that harmonised standardisation system is crucial for European industry competitiveness and they call for a workable solution that would serve both the policy objectives and market needs in an efficient way.

Read the full open letter to Minister Pedro Siza Vieira here.