Internal Market: Joint open letter on industry competitiveness and EU standardisation

Orgalim, together with 17 European associations, has sent an open letter to Mr Pedro Siza Vieira, Minister of State for the Economy and the Digital Transition of Portugal and Chair of the EU Competitiveness Council, raising concerns regarding the European Commission’s over-prescriptive approach to EU harmonised standards and their treatment of standards as an “extension of EU law” rather than a market-driven implementation tool.

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

To read the letter in full, please download it above.