European Council of Engineers Chambers
ECEC
Representing the professional interests of Chartered Engineers, who are members of national Engineers chambers.
ID: 52510694541-69
Lobbying Activity
Response to Standardisation Strategy
6 Aug 2021
European Council of Engineers Chambers
www.ecec.net
Statement on “Roadmap Standardization Strategy”
Consultation deadline 9 August 2021
Prevent excessive standardization
The European Standardization system is an important pillar for the global competitiveness of the European Engineers. Therefore, it is important that it supports European strategic interests and complies with European values and respect the distribution of competences between the democratically legitimized legislative system and the system of standardization.
The core function of standardization - defining all kinds of scientific and technical procedures, methods, materials etc in more detail – is extremely important for the work of engineers. Unfortunately, standardization often exceeds this core function and takes decisions in standardization committees that are in fact decisions that need political consensus.
It is for example quite common, that engineering qualification systems are more and more undermined by standardization activities that define professional activities, professional behaviour and professional qualifications. This is in fact a circumvention of democratically legitimized legislation based on the subsidiarity principle often also de-regulation “through the backdoor”.
But, excessive standardization is also a considerable obstacle for innovative engineering approaches that are so important for a successful green transition.
Innovation in all engineering fields and branches of expertise requires the possibility to fulfil state of the art requirements by providing “equivalent alternative solutions”. Unfortunately, in spite of the voluntary status of many standards, applying equivalent alternative solutions can lead to complex procedural problems and also severe liability problems when it comes to court procedures. Therefore, engineers often decide against excellent innovative approaches – that are often also less costly - in order to protect themselves from liability claims or procedural problems. What makes this even more problematic is the fact, that the standard – often due to rapid technical development but also due to lack of independent expertise in the standardization committee – often does not reflect the state of the art anyway.
Also, in regard to harmonized standards and especially building materials it is very important to consider possibilities to better support innovative alternative solutions. Especially in regard to alternative building materials a lot could be done to better reduce CO2 emissions.
Enhance the participation of Engineering SME in the standardization process by financial support
Many Chartered Engineers are working as SME or even Micro Enterprises. For them in
many cases it is not possible to afford time and resources for standardization work and therefore they cannot bring in their valuable expertise. Industrial companies are mostly much better equipped for that, which often leads to decisions that are not based on well-balanced participation and a good balance of interests. Therefore, it is important to set up support funds to which SMEs /independent experts can apply if they want to join standardization work.
Setting safety standards is in fact often a difficult (societal) procedure of weighing health/safety interests against cost interests, which means that decisions taken by standardization committees often have an enormous impact on our society and/or on different economic sectors.
A well-balanced participation in all standardization committees is therefore necessary and financially supporting the participation of SME is well spent money.
Read full response