The UK government has performed an embarrassing U-turn on its proposed replacement for the widely accepted CE consumer and safety product approval scheme. The UKCA (United Kingdom Conformity Assessed) mark was intended to offer a non-European way for manufacturers to show that their products complied with safety and performance rules. But the obvious handicap of having to comply with two competing standards regimes, with increased costs for testing and packaging changes, has long been a complaint from industry bodies across the economy.
The supposed benefit of the scheme was that it would allow the UK to diverge from European standards for product safety. In reality, it’s been hard to see any advantages for a massively globalised economy, with products designed to cover global markets rather than being custom produced for small national sectors. But in an announcement made on the 1 August, the UK government has said that CE approval will be accepted in Britain indefinitely, with the previous cut-off date of December 2024 now cancelled. That decision seems likely to hole the UKCA scheme below the waterline, with any business that sells in both the UK and the European Union or European Economic Area likely to stick with just one certification scheme, CE, rather than the UK-only proposed scheme.
For the UK bike trade, the impact of the change should be positive. Most protective riding equipment originates outside the UK, with CE approval in place, and the bureaucracy entailed by an additional layer of approval schemes would have added both time and cost. Indeed, the UKCA scheme has already added costs these to well-organised brands which were preparing for the switchover well in advance and now seem to have wasted their investment.
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