KANBrief 3/24
Stefan Pemp of the Ministry for Social Affairs, Health, Labour and Equal Opportunities of Lower Saxony represented the German regional administrations at KAN from 2013 to 2023. In this interview, he talks about his view of KAN and about current challenges in standardization.
The purpose of standardization in technical occupational safety and health and consumer protection is to translate the abstract requirements of legislation such as EU directives and regulations into precise specifications for specific products. In this context, standardization provides a valuable benchmark for market surveillance. In Germany, responsibility for this task lies with the regional administrations (Länder). The situation is different in the area of the safety and health of workers at work. Our view is that standards developers should exercise restraint in this area. Considerable pressure is being exerted internationally to extend standardization activity to OSH. However, this is not consistent with how occupational safety and health is structured. Under EU legislation, OSH is governed by national regulations, which can easily differ from one Member State to another.
The German regional administrations therefore have a range of reasons for participating in standardization activity. Like other stakeholders, however, they also have difficulty making sufficient resources available for this purpose. KAN provides the individual German regional administrations with a means of exerting influence effectively, despite their limited resources and without a representative of the regional administrations dealing personally with each standard. A genuine synergy effect is achieved. The opinion of the regional administrations is that KAN’s value lies particularly in its ability to take an expert view of standardization activity and to focus the interests of the OSH stakeholders. I can also say that the cooperation with the other stakeholders in KAN and with the Secretariat is very congenial and constructive.
A very prominent subject at the time was the review of the situation concerning agricultural machinery standards. The efforts were based on a KAN study showing that the harmonized standards failed to support numerous essential requirements of the Machinery Directive, and that the labour inspectorates had evidently paid virtually no attention to agricultural machinery. Agriculture was an unknown quantity, and the agricultural machinery industry – I say this without wishing to criticize – had adjusted to this situation. There was simply no need for manufacturers to consider product safety, although undoubtedly many believed they were doing everything correctly. KAN’s initiative was extremely beneficial in addressing this situation. There are a host of similar examples where KAN has been helpful, bringing stakeholders together, first conducting an analysis and then developing solutions together with all stakeholders.
I’d like to mention two areas here in which things are changing very quickly. Firstly, the question of how harmonized standards giving rise to a presumption of conformity with underlying EU regulations or directives are developed. In the future, serious discussion will be needed of how much “quick and dirty” development standardization can tolerate. We are forever being told that we need to speed up standardization work. Eventually, though, speed can lead to quality deteriorating beyond what is acceptable. It’s true that not everything needs to be gold-plated. It’s important, though, that we agree on sensible procedures that still meet the requirements for content to be up to date without completely throwing quality overboard.
The second topic concerns the safety and health of workers at work. EU framework legislation in this area lays down minimum standards within which the Member States are free to formulate their own requirements. When a desire exists for international standardization, applicable from India via America to Europe, it’s clearly difficult to reconcile the competing requirements. It’s quite conceivable that standardization, with the normative power of facts on the ground, will simply prevail on a wide scale, and that legal objections from some EU Member State or other will be considered petty and not taken seriously. Finding a practicable procedure and closely monitoring standardization activity consistent with the national body of regulations is an honourable task, albeit not an easy one. Here, the KAN network is a dependable resource.