Pressure equipment: harmonisation of essential safety requirements

Adopting the report by Mr Roger BARTON (PSE, UK), Parliament ratified the agreement reached by the Parliament and Council Conciliation Committee on 4 February 1997 on pressure equipment. To ensure that pressure equipment subject to a pressure greater than 0.5 bar - a vast range of products from simple pressure cookers to very complex water-tube boilers - can circulate freely, it is essential to have a common safety level without reducing the existing safety levels in the Member States. The agreement reached in the conciliation committee, chaired jointly by Mr Renzo IMBENI (PSE, I) for Parliament and Mr Michiel PATIJN for the Council should make this harmonization possible. The Parliament delegation considered it essential to improve the safety of the most dangerous types of equipment (categories III and IV). This covers such equipment as condensers/coolers of the type used in air conditioning units, certain air storage tanks used in garages for inflating tyres or propane gas cylinders of a certain size. The Council finally accepted the main points made by Parliament, that checks should be carried out during the manufacture of such equipment at the place of manufacture by agencies independent of the manufacturer and that such checks should be made more exhaustive than the Council had initially proposed. �