'Uniform needs' – EU law

The European Commission is made up of a number of departments that each takes responsibility for the preparation and production of various legislative provisions. Although there is a 'blue print' for guidance in the production of legislation called the 'Blue Book', it is the case that legislation produced over the years does not have the same administrative needs. 

So it may be that in one provision there is a clearly specified requirement for the provision of information and in another there may only be a simple reference or indeed, no reference at all.

Decision number 768/2008/EC provides for all the common rules that should be applied across all new approach directives, either existing or newly introduced. The framework states: ‘This decision lays down common principles and reference provisions intended to apply across sectorial legislation in order to provide a coherent basis for revision or recasts of that legislation.’

This means that issues such as conformity assessment, accreditation and market surveillance are now to be commonly applied.

One of the provisions in the decision is to clarify responsibilities throughout the transfer of a product from manufacturer to user. This ‘economic operator’ is defined as ‘the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer and the distributor.’

The 'Blue Book' states that, ‘Provisions regarding distribution are in general not included in New Approach directives’, although it does go on to state: ‘The distributor shall act with due care in order not to place clearly non-compliant products on the Community market. He shall also be capable of demonstrating this to the national surveillance authority.’

It is this principle that is identified in the NLF decision and will subsequently be adopted into all approach directives – old and new.

There are concerns from sectors of the manufacturing industry that there will be a sudden demand for documentation from distributors to establish compliance of a product, with the resulting increased costs.

The NLF in the form of the decision is addressing an ‘administrative need' across a wide spectrum of legislation. Initially 10 directives were in line for treatment, which have now been published. 

One of these, the Pressure Equipment Directive, 97/23/EC could not be processed due to a change in another EU law that affects certain technical issues, but this has now been resolved. The promise in the NLF is that ‘the alignment should not result in any changes to technical content’ and, with any moves to simplify legislative compliance welcome, the industry waits with interest to see how the situation develops.