Broad agreement on how market surveillance in the EU can be improved
In order to gather the opinions of stakeholders on how the principle of mutual recognition can be reinforced and how the number of non-compliant products on the internal market can be reduced the EU Commission launched last year, within the framework of its internal market strategy (COM(2015) 550 final), two public consultations.
The results have now been published. Among these can be mentioned that:
- 89 % of the respondents consider that products within their sectors are affected by non-compliance
- 80 % of the responding companies confirm that non-compliance has a negative effect on sales and market shares of compliant companies
- Respondents believe that the most important reason for non-compliance is a deliberate choice to break the rules in order to gain advantages (33 %), followed by a lack of knowledge of the rules (27 %), other type of inability to comply (11 %) or ambiguity in the rules (10 %)
- All respondents have experience of authorities lacking financial, human and technical resources for market surveillance
- 50 % of the market surveillance authorities are in favour of levying administrative fees for the surveillance, whereas 55 % of business and 40 % of the consumers are against
- 80-85 % of the authorities, businesses and consumers believe that authorities should have more knowledge about their different sectors, e.g. type and number of economic operators and market trends
- Close to 60 % of authorities, 47 % of business and 60 % of the consumers consider that the authorities need stronger powers
- 70-80 % of business and the consumers believe think that authorities should share capacity of testing laboratories, both within a member state and between member states. The corresponding figure among authorities is 50-60%.
- 75 % state that products within their sector are sold online, 10 % state that this is not the case
- There is a broad agreement of the need for more explicit requirements on economic operators to reply to queries etc. from authorities in other member states,
- There is also a need for stronger requirements on authorities to cooperate with each other (mutual assistance).
More information, the summary of the results and position papers can be found on the following pages: