The EU’s new regulation on General Product Safety (GPSR) requires businesses selling into the EU and Northern Ireland to have a named point of contact – an ‘EU responsible person’ within the EU – and to make their products visibly traceable through batch or serial number.
Online businesses selling through a third party platform will have to verify their compliance with GPSR requirements. The regulation applies to all non-food goods.
While the regulations have been scheduled since late July, they have largely flown under the radar, with businesses complaining of a lack of information and time to prepare. The UK government’s own guidance for the new rules was published on 3 December, just 10 days before the regulations came into force.
“We just don’t know yet how it is going to be implemented and enforced,” Kyle Jardine, the BPIF’s economist and Northern Ireland manager, told Printweek.
“In Europe, they often raise these directives, then see how companies implement them before issuing more guidance. So unfortunately there’s little in the way of official guidelines.”
The BPIF is currently working on its own supporting guidance for printers dealing with the new rules.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Wake up to Money programme, Kate Foster, senior international affairs advisor at the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said that many of the FSB’s constituent businesses had reached out with concerns.
“We would have liked to have seen guidance much, much earlier, because businesses need time to prepare,” she said.
“Sanctions and regulations range from fines to product bans, and we don’t yet have a sense for how stringent the EU is going to be from day one. It could be that on day one they’ll take a more light-touch approach, but the concern that we’re hearing from members is that they don’t know what they’re expected to do, and they’re very worried about getting things wrong.”
The new regulations are intended to stop the European market from being flooded with unsafe products, and to establish a chain of responsibility for products on the market.
“It’s basically a backstop to cover safety legislation for products that don’t already have more stringent safety regulations in place,” Jardine added.
“I wouldn’t say that printed products are necessarily the target for this legislation. They’re intrinsically pretty safe – so from that point of view, it’s not a major concern. But the extra burden is something we’d rather not have.
The regulations’ requirement that companies have a registered ‘responsible person’ is likely to represent a particular cost for exporters, Jardine said.
“There are companies out there that will act as an authorised representative – and it just takes a Google search – but it’s another cost,” he said.
“If a company is able to conform, then ultimately it makes things easier for them. These regulations are just to stop the European market from being flooded with unsafe products. You can understand the concerns that they have – but this is something that companies in Europe have to deal with too.”
