Britain to keep European standards

The decision to maintain 20,000 industry directives will enable ‘frictionless’ trade, says ‘Kitemark’ chief

BRITAIN is to keep all of Europe’s business standards after Brexit by applying to remain a full member of Europe’s three business standards agencies after March 2019, the head of the UK’S official standards agency has told The Daily Telegraph.

Howard Kerr, the chief executive of the BSI which bestows the ‘Kitemark’ symbol, said the move will commit the UK to maintaining some 20,000 industrial and technical standards in order to facilitate “frictionless” trade after

Brexit.

“The preference in industry and government is for the UK to continue to trade using single standards across Europe and for the UK being a full member of the three [European standards] agencies,” he said in an interview.

The BSI, which is a private body that operates under a UK government mandate from the Department of Trade, is already in the process of formally requesting the right to remain a member of the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) after Brexit.

The move will require CEN and two other European standards organisations to re-write their membership statutes to enable Britain to re-join when the UK becomes a non-eu country. The BSI and Government are quietly confident this will happen. CEN, and its sister-organisations CENELEC and ETSI which produce electro-technical and telecoms standards, are not European Union bodies, and includes EEA member states like Norway as well as EU accession countries, like Turkey and Serbia, among their membership.

The Government committed to remaining a full member of the three bodies in the Brexit White Paper earlier this year as a means of retaining British influence in the creation of global standards.

However, the move will raise some questions about the extent to which Brexit will enable the UK to diverge from EU standards, with some 25 per cent of published European standards being developed “as a result of requests from the European Commission”, according to the White Paper. “As a full future member of the European future standards system, with harmonised standards and national adoption of those standards, it would not be possible for the UK to diverge on harmonised EU standards [after Brexit],” Mr

‘Why would business want different standards for trading in the UK? Firms want to make products once’

Kerr conceded. In theory it would remain possible to create specific UK standards for products being sold solely in the UK market, but in practice Mr Kerr said business had no appetite for creating cumbersome dual standards regimes. “Why would business want different standards for trading in the UK? Business wants to make products once, to one single standard,” he added.

The adherence to EU product standards could have a bearing on Britain’s ability to cut trade deals with the rest of the world, according to Prof Alan Winters, director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at Sussex University.

“The UK will be negotiating with third countries, but with a good deal less muscle than the EU,” he said. “The EU has more ability to lean on a partner to accept their standards, but it will be the same dynamic.”

Allie Renison, the head of EU and trade policy at the Institute of Directors (IOD), said the decision would send the right signal to the EU 27.