Another humiliating Tory Brexit climbdown
The Tory government quietly abandons enforcement of their UKCA replacement for the European CE quality mark
The Tories were told from the beginning that it was a stupid idea to try to invent a British duplicate of the European CE mark, but for years they persisted because they wanted regulatory divergence between Brexit Britain and the European Union.
Tory politicians insisted that if manufacturers wanted to sell products in the UK and the EU, they would have to do two sets of paperwork, one to obtain the post-Brexit UKCA mark, and another to obtain the CE mark for the much bigger European market.
UK manufacturers made their objections clear, but the Tories forced them to spent fortunes preparing to deal with the headache of dual regulatory regimes, only to postpone enforcement of their UKCA mark again and again.
Finally the overwhelming hostility to their plan for a new layer of post-Brexit bureaucracy has forced the Tories to climb down via the quiet announcement that full enforcement of UKCA has been indefinitely postponed for almost all sectors.
If businesses want to sell products in the UK, the majority will be able to choose whether to use the European CE mark, or the post-Brexit UKCA mark, meaning UKCA essentially does nothing except duplicate the CE quality standard for no reason.
The British Chamber of Commerce said that British businesses would “breathe a sigh of relief” at the abandonment of this burdensome Tory Brexit folly; pointed out their consistent track record of opposing enforcement of this pointless UKCA quality assurance regime; and insisted that regulatory divergence from EU standards is a bad idea.
Only construction and medical suppliers will be forced to continue preparing for the implementation of UKCA certification, which provoked exasperated responses from the Construction Products Association and the British Healthcare Trades Association, who understandably want to know why their sectors have been singled out for the added burden of post-Brexit regulatory divergence, while everyone else gets to throw this pointless Tory paperwork in the bin where it belongs.
Questions
If products marked CE can be sold in the UK and the EU, but products marked UKCA are only good for sale within the UK, why on earth would any manufacturer that wants to trade in both economies ever choose UKCA?
If UKCA merely imitates European CE quality standards in almost all sectors, what the hell is the point of it?
Why did the Tory government persist for so long with this pointless folly in the face of overwhelming hostility from the businesses they were planning to impose it on?
Will the Tories be compensating businesses that have wasted time and money preparing to comply with the pointless regulatory regime they just quietly scrapped, or are British businesses expected to just absorb those costs as a Brexit dead loss?
What have the construction and medical sectors done wrong that the Tory government has singled them out to bear the expensive and time-consuming burden of continuing with UKCA regulatory divergence?
And how dare the Tory government attempt to pass off their humiliating climbdown as a wonderful success story of ‘reducing pointless red tape’, when they were the ones who dreamt up and tried to implement this unpopular and pointless added layer of bureaucracy in the first place?
This one has really got to me, at this point what is their argument for being outside the single market and customs union if we’re going to follow all their rules anyway. And if we are going to follow all the EU’s rules we may as well have stayed and had some say in those rules!
Even this is still restrictive.
There can be no UK "Notified Bodies" - organisations that set themselves up as approved test-houses for certain aspects of CE compliance - they must be in an EU country.
(or, for that matter, accrediting bodies that approve the notified bodies in the first place)
Also there *were* UK-based businesses that made their business out of specialised areas of compliance-testing, such as electromagnetic-compatability - these lost that work overnight.