Machinery Directive – CECE reacts to new impact assessment report

The European Commission recently published a new report to assess the impact of the potential options towards the revision of the Machinery Directive (MD). These reports are used by the EC to decide which legislative proposals to make and form an integral part of the EU’s Better Regulation agenda.

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This impact assessment report takes a closer look at the 4 policy options that were identified in a 2018 study which was aimed at reviewing the effectiveness of the current version of the MD.

1. Address new challenges posed by technological developments by adapting the MD’s Essential Health and Safety Requirements (EHSR).
2. Address the problems identified during the evaluation of the MD (alignment with the New Legislative Framework, definition of partly-completed machinery, digital provision of documentation/instruction manuals).
3. Modify Annex IV to make third-party conformity assessment obligatory for all types of machinery.
4. Convert the MD into a European Regulation.

The specific goal of this study was indeed to assess the impacts of these different policy options and advise the EC in choosing the most cost-effective one to ensure a high level of health and safety.

Overall, this new impact assessment study has identified that the MD is fit for purpose to ensure the health and safety of machinery users within a well-functioning internal market. However, it indicates that some revisions and the application of different policy options would further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the Directive.

Having contributed to the study by responding to questionnaires and interviews, CECE welcomes the publication of such a deep and rigorous evaluation exercise. On the basis of these results, the experts within the CECE Project Team Machinery express their disagreement with policy options 1 & 3 and call on the EC to reject them in the ensuing phase of the legislative proposal. On the other hand, CECE agrees with policy option 4 and partly agrees with policy option 2.

By supporting policy option 4, CECE states that any legislative revision should start from the conversion of the current Directive into a Regulation. Indeed CECE agrees with the overall conclusion in the study that this conversion would be beneficial, decreasing delays in transposition and differences in interpretation across Member States and therefore decreasing costs resulting from these aspects.

On policy option 2, the construction machinery sector agrees with aligning the Directive to the New Legislative Framework and the idea of allowing for digital provision of documentation & instruction manuals. In addition, CECE shares and support the report’s opinion that the new MD should not remove the concept of Partly-Completed Machinery as it would bring extra costs. 

CECE strongly disagrees with policy option 3, because there is no evidence that the safety level is compromised by the use of self-assessment. According to CECE, this is due to certain stakeholders’ lack of technical knowledge of the standardisation system and is linked to a biased and unsubstantiated idea that internal checks and self-assessment lead to safety concerns. All the knowledgeable stakeholders have been applying this approach for more than 20 years without any specific concern and the removal of this possibility would have a significant impact on costs for the manufacturers and the users.

Finally, on policy option 1, CECE does not believe that there is a need to adapt any Essential Health and Safety Requirements to address new challenges posed by technological development. The report itself makes it clear that there is no evidence of faults within machine learning in the machinery sector. In any case, CECE stresses that the type of AI that is used right now – so-called narrow AI – can be fully risk-assessed by the MD’s current provisions.

CECE continues to monitor the preparation phase of the legislative proposal and maintains direct contacts with the European Commission’s services in charge of the MD revision.

For more information please contact CECE at info@cece.eu.