UKCA Marking – Why Is The Government Ignoring The Obvious Solution?

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Gary Shoesmith at Edgetech says leaving the EU product safety marking scheme is a mess – but at least the UK bureaucrats have conceded in allowing a little more time for hard-pressed UK manufacturers to come to terms with the ridiculous disaster of the government’s making.

Shoesmith is head of technical & quality at Edgetech UK (the IGU spacer bar manufacturer). He writes that at last ‘common sense’ has prevailed regarding product safety regulations and the UK’s exit from the EU – but we still have some concerns.

We’ve been closely following the government’s plans for replacing the CE Mark, the symbol that, for decades, has indicated a product complies with EU health, safety and environmental protection laws. - the handling of the process is far from satisfactory.

First, ministers suddenly announced that businesses would have to start complying with its new UKCA mark by January 2022 – leaving extremely little time for thousands of companies to get vast numbers of products retested.

Faced with a backlash from industry and lobbying from trade bodies, the government extended the deadline to 1 January 2023.

 

Give a little bit

One of the biggest challenges preventing businesses from certifying their products to the new UK standard was the lack of a mutual recognition agreement that would allow them to use test data from EU recognised notified test houses to support their certification.

This has changed. The government has made it clear that AVCP System 3 testing data from an EU recognised notified body will be accepted until 31 December 2022.

This barely makes things easier - there are still only a relatively small number of UK test centres to go around – and thousands of businesses from multiple sectors rushing to get their products tested.

 

Fear

Our fear is that this is only going to provide short-term relief and many of these tests take many months to complete in test centres already backed up.

So, there’s the question of what happens in the long-term. After we reach the 1 January 2023 deadline, if testing is delayed or incomplete or if recertification is required as a result of product introduction or changes, what happens then?

If the only test resources are UK approved bodies, how does the industry cope, particularly when not all certification required is even available from a UK approved body?

 

IGUs could be in short supply

Currently there’s a lack of UK approved bodies capable of testing IGUs to certain specific requirements in EN1279 or WA17/1 thermal testing in the UK.

And then there’s the extremely complicated situation in Northern Ireland – where businesses are faced with the costly and challenging prospect of having to meet CE, UKCA, and the territory’s own UKNI marks all at once, potentially having to gain duplicate certification from different regional test bodies.

 

Solution

Rather than a succession of quick fixes, none of which deal with the core issue, we hope we’ll see governments in the UK and the EU agree on the most pragmatic solution – an ongoing Mutual Recognition Agreement. This would see EU approved-body test certificates accepted in the UK and vice versa.

Picture: Gary Shoesmith at IGU spacer bar manufacturer Edgetech says there is a simple solution to the current disaster of trying to move from CE Marking to UKCA marking for product safety.

www.edgetechig.co.uk

Article written by Cathryn Ellis
28th July 2022

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