The report presented by the Commission gives an overview of how the accreditation provisions of Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 and the CE marking were implemented between 2013 and 2017. It was prepared in cooperation with the Member States through the accreditation sub-group of the ‘Internal market for products’ experts group.
The main findings of the report are as follows:
1) Accreditation: the Regulation plays a key part in facilitating the free movement of goods in the internal market and international trade. Under its provisions, the Member States appoint a single National Accreditation Body that provides accreditation of conformity assessment bodies.
The Regulation provides for a uniformly rigorous approach to accreditation in all Member States — so that ultimately one accreditation certificate is enough to demonstrate the technical capacity of a conformity assessment body throughout Europe. Therefore, the benefit of accreditation in the EU is that once a conformity assessment body has been successfully accredited according to the Regulation, Member States' authorities are obliged to recognise the accreditation certificate. This eliminates the unnecessary overhead of being accredited separately in every Member State and having the products checked by different conformity assessment bodies. This creates an environment favourable for developing businesses in the European market.
The proportion of notifications of accredited conformity assessment bodies increased by 34 percentage points between end 2009 and November 2017. By the end of 2016, more than 34 450 accreditations were delivered (in regulated and non-harmonised areas) covering a wide range of activities.
In 2016, the peer evaluation teams reported a total of 135 findings where corrective action was required by national accreditation bodies. The European accreditation is monitoring how the corrective action is being implemented. The Commission recognised the European Cooperation for Accreditation (EA) as the European accreditation infrastructure.
The Regulation established a trustworthy and stable accreditation system in all Member States, as well as EFTA countries and Turkey. With the provisional entry into force of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement on 21 September 2017, the Protocol on Mutual Acceptance of the Results of the Conformity Assessment of CETA extended the scope of the previous Mutual Acceptance and simplified the procedures for the designation of conformity assessment bodies. The Protocol relies on accreditation, which thus becomes an even more important pillar for international cooperation with third countries.
Legal developments related to accreditation have occurred in specific sectors such as data protection, food and feed and cybersecurity.
However, the challenge is to keep the whole accreditation system in line with the latest state of the art and ensure that it is applied with the same stringency.
It is therefore essential that the Union continues to support the EA to help it carry out its tasks. In addition, it is important to maintain a high level of awareness and understanding of the accreditation system among stakeholders in order to ensure its correct implementation, especially in new policy areas.
2) CE marking: the report confirmed that businesses are also better aware of the important role of CE marking on products in the single market. There is a need for greater consistency and to avoid having different requirements for different pieces of legislation and address the issue of products with multiple parts.
The number of visits to the CE marking web pages demonstrates the importance of this information being made available to stakeholders.