Following the recent Government announcement that the implementation of the UKCA Marking had been delayed again to 2025, Craig Sanders, Joint Managing Director of Protrade, has called for sense and to “revert back to a perfectly fine and previously accepted universal standard.”
So, the inevitable happened. The UK Government, once again, delayed the implementation of the UKCA Marking. This UK-equivalent product safety mark was supposed to provide assurance that manufacturers were working to consistent safety and product standards.
While Brexit has made this new marking a necessity — thanks to the EU stating it would no longer recognise products tested in the UK — all it has done is cause frustration and confusion. Even with the initial January 2023 deadline for UKCA implementation, business owners have been desperately searching for testing houses in this country so that they could fulfil the new requirements.
The biggest issue was that those testing houses just didn’t exist.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been invested in new testing facilities and equipment in a race to address the situation with that looming deadline in mind, only for the Government to backtrack — for a third time — late last year and push the deadline right back to 2025.
To no one’s surprise, the latest extension has only caused more frustration, bringing more unnecessary costs to businesses. Here at Protrade, I wouldn’t like to think about how many hours have been spent discussing the matter — the time, the phone calls with third parties and companies invested in equipment that they didn’t need.
This flip-flopping makes a mockery of the whole thing.
The senseless cost of replicated data
While the recurring goalpost shifting has been a frustration, the fact we’re doing it over the same requirements is equally so. For anyone that is unfamiliar with the UKCA Marking, the standard requirement it needs to carry is exactly the same as the EU’s CE Marking — regardless of where items are tested, the results will be the exact same.
The only difference is that the testing needs to be done in this country rather than in another across the channel. It’s a replication of data at enormous costs. If you did a controlled test of what temperature water boils at, it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, what culture you have, or what political persuasion you work to. It will be 100°C.
The answers you’ll get back are identical, and this wait and change to our industry are wholly unnecessary. At this point, and taking Brexit off the table, does it not just make more sense for the UK and EU to get together and mutually recognise that the CE Marking is acceptable in the UK again?
The price of getting product lines UKCA approved goes far beyond just paying for testing. Distributors and merchants also have to think about the artwork and branding on product boxes so that they are all up to date. There’s a lot more to consider than initially meets the eye.
At Protrade, we were very fortunate with one of our CE-marked products. We had luckily run to almost zero, and we were able to print new boxes with the UKCA branding. But any business that ordered boxes with the wrong accreditation is now going to have wasted tens of thousands of pounds on the packaging that will have to be scrapped.
That raises an entirely different environmental issue too.
All this latest delay has done is kick the can down the road to be dealt with for another time. Yet thousands of pounds have already been invested in the UKCA Marking by many companies with those that built testing facilities now forced to redeploy people and not expecting the level of business they had projected.
Furthermore, UK distributors and merchants may have already signed binding contracts with much higher prices with UK-based testing companies, thinking they didn’t have a choice.
Will we be in exactly the same position in two years’ time? Many of the biggest importers in the country are going to sit tight and see how it plays out but, come the summer of 2024, there will be a last-minute dash, with hundreds of thousands of product lines that need testing in a three-month period, depending on the outcome.
Then it will be a complete bottleneck in the system. And of course, good old-fashioned supply and demand mean that there will be 24-hour shifts, so prices will go up, and there will be even more inflation.
So, what comes next?
Let’s start with the good news. For now, any existing products that were CE marked in the EU are still allowed to be distributed in the UK. Now for the bad. Any new products will need to be UKCA certified in this country, which means using UK-based testing houses.
While the solution will work in the meantime, the Government has told business owners that this is only temporary. After backtracking several times, though, it’s getting harder and harder to hear that.
So, will the UKCA marking ever be fully implemented? Or will some sense and reason be found and have all CE standards pass UK checks? I guess only time will tell.
Protrade is a leading UK-based provider of power tools and associated products. The group headquarters and national distribution centre is situated in Derby, with Protrade depots located throughout the East Midlands.
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