The introduction of the post-Brexit health and safety quality mark has been described by the chief executive of the Fire Industry Association as a farce that “makes absolutely zero sense”.
Ian Moore, who leads the trade body for fire safety in the UK, said replacing the European Union’s CE mark with the UK Conformity Assessed (UKCA) mark “makes zero difference to increasing the quality of the products”. He added: “It doesn’t add any value whatsoever; it’s just bureaucracy and will cost the fire industry millions of pounds.”
The association represents more than a thousand UK manufacturers of fire safety equipment, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises.
The government postponed the introduction of the post-Brexit product safety regime for a third time at the end of last year, giving businesses until the end of 2024 to replace the EU’s CE mark.
Sure, that’s all true of the UKCA. But here’s the secret – it was all true of the CE before that. It’s a piece of bureaucratic paper. Fill out the form correctly, pay the fee, get the mark. That’s it and that’s all it ever has been.
It’s all only ever been tossery.
Indeed, I think it may have been Christopher Booker who exposed this. The CE brand has literally no meaning in terms of safety. I actually now look for it on any piece of Chinese tat and scoff loudly at it.
Fill out the form correctly, pay the fee, get the mark.
A propos – how’s the Fair Tax Mark these days?
But of course the UKCA means the British bureaucrats can avoid being bullied by their EU counterparts. They can say to them fuck off you foreign turds, we’ll do it our way.
The fire safety people have to deal with the EU wankers themselves. If they want to sell anything in Europe that is.
@Ottokring: “I actually now look for it on any piece of Chinese tat and scoff loudly at it.”
If you look closely and compare it with the CE mark from an EU bit of kit you’ll notice 9 times out of 10 that the letters aren’t exactly the same. There’s a fake CE logo used by most Chinese factories that saves on the paperwork.
Depending on the product – mostly CE is self certification with no ttest to pass. Hence not much cheap eastern imported stuff does actually meet CE standard.
In any event if it meets CE it also automatically meets UKCA so it’s just another bit of text on the label, on an extra sticker.
@Arthur…
One would have thought that those fiendish orientals would have been capable of producing an accurate cut-and-paste of the official CE mark!
Yes, but, yes, but… they couldn’t blame the CE mark on Brexit.
“Indeed, I think it may have been Christopher Booker who exposed this.”
One of the last things he did was expose the fact that the “CE certified” cladding on the Grenfell tower wouldn’t have passed British Standards. (Which still exist, but involve actual testing by an impartial third party. God knows why we’ve just transposed CE into UKCA, rather than abolishing the entire farce and going back to Kitemarks. Oh yeah… there wouldn’t be any failures to blame on Brexit.)
@BJ: ISTR that the official CE mark is actually trade marked, so an exact copy could get all of a manufacturer’s range banned for ™ violation. Something daft like that anyway, doing an end run around bureaucracy.
Definition of a CE Mark product: A load of crap, but beautifully documented.
It’s about systems not goods. The environment where something is made, not how and its quality. Every link in the chain of supply relies on the paperwork from the previous, showing compliance but no testing is done by the recipient or the last link in the chain. For some goods it is self-certification: we operate to a high standard because we say we do.
This is his how horse meat got into the food chain, nobody checked along the way just relying on ‘certificates’ of compliance and origin arriving with the meat. An invitation for forgery and fraud. Why the Continentals love it.
The UK binned its BSA Kitemark for this nonsense.
It’s like BS5750. It doesn’t mean you have a quality reduction, just that your processes are documented and you can replicate the shoddy product you produce.
@ottokring ” The CE brand has literally no meaning in terms of safety. I actually now look for it on any piece of Chinese tat and scoff loudly at it.” It’s suspected that the CE mark on chinese tat stands for Chinese export.
Is UL the only safety mark that actually means anything?
The Canadian one has been exposed as being a sham too.
Side note – the reason to have a UK specific one is the same reason the EU had one. So you have control of your own standards.
Nothing is stopping the UK from accepting the CE mark alongside it’s own – indeed, it may be that for manufacturers that only sell within the UK it may be cheaper and easier to forgo CE cert for a UK only one.