The Builders Merchants Federation (BMF) has described plans to make merchants responsible for checking CE marked products comply with their declaration of conformity as “unreasonable and unworkable”.
As part of the EU’s proposed Construction Products Regulation, which is designed to supersede the Construction Products Directive, BMF says the onus would be placed on merchants, as distributors, to ascertain whether or not every construction product they sell should carry a CE mark.
Merchants would be given the responsibility of pulling a product from the shelf they “consider or have reason to believe is not in conformity with the declaration of performance”, as well as checking the correct, up-to-date documentation is supplied with products sold.
BMF says this will be costly and “impossible for smaller companies to meet within their current staffing structures”.
“Such responsibility is clearly that of the manufacturer or importer and merchants can only be guided by the information that is supplied to them by these parties,” said BMF secretary Peter Matthews.
“To expect otherwise assumes an unreasonable and unrealistic level of product development knowledge.”
Mr Matthews added that implementation of the regulation would also require distributors to maintain an up-to-date database of manufacturers’ conformity documentation, which he described as “impractical”.
