Radio Equipment Directive – LPRA Update 5th June 2013

Radio Equipment Directive – LPRA Update

Late in March 2013, the LPRA Council held a meeting with MEP Malcolm Harbour CBE, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (“IMCO”) to raise concerns about the then recently published Radio Equipment Directive (“RED”) proposed by the European Commission to replace the R&TTE Directive The Council subsequently sought input from all members and submitted a comprehensive response to his committee detailing the many aspects of the proposed RED that we were concerned about. These concerns ranged from dissatisfaction with the transparency of the negotiations leading to the drafting of the proposed Directive through to fears about the anticipated consequences of the Directive if enacted in its current form on our members’ interests. Although the European Commission identified many of the changes as being beneficial to industry and particularly to SME’s, the opinion of your Council is to the contrary – many of these changes would add dramatically to the administrative burden on your business or require you to disclose technically sensitive information to the Commission with no guarantee of confidentiality. We are pleased to report that all of our concerns have been positively accepted by IMCO and embodied in their response to the Commission (please see link below), requesting the proposed legislation be re-drafted to reflect their concerns with the current wording.  Although this is a welcome situation, we are far from the conclusion to this process and your Council is now composing a response to IMCO supporting the proposed changes. 

We welcome your input to this process and ask you to submit any concerns, comments or questions to the LPRA's Membership Secretary Phil Bremner (phil@business-synergies.co.uk).

In addition we are seeking a joint meeting with ETSI and IMCO to review the changes, present our comments and provide our support to the process of reforming the R&TTE Directive in a way that will be beneficial to our members as well as to consumers.



LINKS



IMCO MEP Barbara Weiler's Draft Report on RED 26.4.2013         http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+COMPARL+PE-510.528+01+DOC+PDF+V0//EN

Draft Report Amendments 88 -123 5.6.2013 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bCOMPARL%2bPE-513.158%2b01%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN

Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment (R&TTE) http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/sectors/rtte/documents/legislation/review/index_en.htm

UK Government's Open Consultation on the Radio Equipment Directive * * CLOSES 3rd JUNE 2013 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/radio-equipment-directive-proposal#download