In December Small Business Standards, jointly with EBC (European Builders’ Confederation) and SMEunited published a new position paper with its proposals and recommendations for the future of the European Standardisation System (ESS). The paper was published in response to the ongoing public consultation on the revision of Regulation 1025/2012 on European standardisation.
In the paper, SBS reaffirmed again its full support for the overall structure of the ESS, centred on Regulation 1025. While overall Regulation 1025/2012 overall has been an undeniable success since its inception, achieving tangible progress, particularly with regards to the inclusiveness of the system, there is certainly space for improvements in terms of speed and market responsiveness.
In the paper, SBS sets out three main goals that should be at the centre of the revision process:
- Increase the development speed and market responsiveness of European standards, helping SMEs to mitigate the risk of legal and technical uncertainty and allows them to access new markets, invest and grow, without sacrificing inclusiveness and genuine consensus.
- Further improve the inclusiveness of the system at national and European level. Standards that do not consider the needs and specificities of SMEs will lead to increased burdens, much lower uptake of standards and loss of business opportunities for the European economy as a whole.
- Strengthen Europe’s role as a global standards-setter, helping SMEs internationalise, access new markets and grow. The ESS is the most inclusive standardisation system in the world, and Europe must be a leader in international standardisation to ensure inclusiveness at a global level.
For each of these three goals, the paper analyses the current setup of the ESS and puts forward concrete and feasible proposals to be readily implemented and that would drastically increase the benefits that SMEs can derive from standardisation.
Beyond these, SBS also proposes expresses a clear stance and puts forward recommendations in other areas vital to the future of the standardisation system, like the necessity for its robust and consistent financing and the need to create together a new generation of standardisers by boosting education to standardisation
Standards can provide extraordinary economic opportunities for SMEs and for the Single Market as a whole, not only as vital tools for compliance, but as an investment for growth. The only way to achieve this, is to make sure that SMEs have as much impact as possible.
For SBS, the voice of European SMEs in standardisation, representing 22 million SMEs all across Europe, this is our mission!
