Report on the implementation of EU standardisation policy and the contribution of European standards to EU policies

Background and further information:

The economic landscape is changing within the EU and among its international trading partners. Boundaries between traditional manufacturing, digitisation and services are increasingly blurring and the digital solutions are progressively integrated into global industrial value chains. In the face of these challenges, the Commission should translate this economic reality into its standardisation priorities for European policies and legislations, together with the inter-institutional partners. In the Communication European standards for the 21st century in June 2016, the Commission presented a new vision for European Standardisation System (ESS) to meet these challenges.

The new vision spelled out in the Communication goes beyond the traditional way of dealing with standards at EU level which in the past was limited to technical support for EU harmonisation needs. The new vision focuses on the contribution of standardisation to societal challenges and European policies such as promoting innovation, increasing quality and safety, boosting jobs and growth, supporting global value chains and the development of the Single Market.

One of the most important principles of standardisation is transparency, which requires establishing tools for communicating and sharing information with the interested parties. In European standardisation, this has hitherto been achieved through the annual Union work programme for European standardisation (AUWP) and the Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation.

This report aims to explain how the individual actions and actors of the previous AUWPs, the Communication on ICT standardisation priorities for the digital single market and the Joint Initiative on Standardisation have so far contributed to the objectives set by the Communication. It is divided into two parts; one covering the policy elements of this new vision and one concerning cooperation with stakeholders. It is accompanied by a Staff Working Document detailing the progress on the different actions of the aforementioned AUWPs and other ongoing activities. This report is intended to support the inter-institutional dialogue envisaged in the Communication, which the Commission will pursue with the co-legislators during the months following it with a view to laying the foundations for the work on the 2019 AUWP.

EUR-Lex: SWD(2018)15: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2018:015:FIN

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