News

The European Commission has opened a public consultation on the Construction Products Regulation (CPR), open online to 18th July 2017, proposing policy options including repealing the Regulation, modifying it, or maintaining it as is.

At present, the CPR defines EU harmonised standards for construction products, and Member States or other regulators, architects, building companies can then specify what level of EU standard is required for products to be used in different applications. For example, the CPR defines different levels of fire resistance and smoke emission for construction products and national or city regulators can then specify what level is required in different types of building (e.g. for external or internal application, public or private building, high rise …). The CPR is fully applicable since July 2013 (less than 4 years) and the current consultation is based on a Commission report (11 pages) on its implementation, dated July 2016. This report notes that Member States have been slow to bring their construction regulations into compliance with the CPR and that harmonised European standards still need to be developed or updated for some concerned construction products, but that 75-80% of construction products are already today covered by such standards. This report concludes that not all the CPR objectives have yet been obtained after only a short period of implementation, that further guidance on implementation is necessary, that standards development processes should be streamlined and that certain articles of the CPR would benefit from clarification (page 11). The “Inception Impact Assessment” specifically submitted to the current public consultation refers to this report and points to incomplete/imperfect uptake of CPR harmonisation rules by Member States. Several policy options are submitted to consultation: maintain the CPR “as is” with efforts on flexible and uniform interpretation; adjust the CPR to take into account the above report proposals; profoundly revise the CPR for example to remove harmonisation for some products or to replace product specification by building performance approaches; or to repeal the CPR with no replacement EU regulation. Any company, organisation or individual can respond online to this consultation which is open to 18th July 2017, by submitting a 4 000 character free text and/or a PDF document, to express your opinions concerning the importance of the CPR to and your proposals for improving building fire safety in Europe. pinfa is preparing a response to the public consultation, and also is active via the EU Commission’s Technical Platform Meeting on the CPR Review.