Zug, Switzerland, February 2021 – Euralarm congratulates the Portuguese EU Council Presidency and fully supports the Presidency's objectives of supporting the European Single Market and leading the European Union towards a more resilient, global, greener, fair and more digital society. Since 1970, the association has worked hard to contribute to the European ideals by representing the interests of the fire safety and security industry in the areas of standardisation development and legislation.

Over the past years Euralarm has repeatedly expressed its concern over the European Commission’s interference in EU harmonised standards. Euralarm, together with its partners and stakeholders, consider harmonised standards to be a market-driven implementation tool, rather than an “extension of EU law”. To successfully recover from the present crisis and enable the industry to fully contribute to the green and digital transition, Euralarm urges the EU to stop treating harmonised standards as part of EU law but rather consider them to be part of the revision of the Industrial Strategy for Europe and the NLF for products. Euralarm believes that the standardisation processes that have been effective for so many years will continue to be successful, if the Commission, Member States, European standardisation organisations and other stakeholders participate in that process. By doing so, they support innovation in Europe and enable industry to thrive on a global scale.

The very essence of standardisation is that it is a bottom-up process driven by a consensus of the industry through European standardisation organisations. Using standards as a legislation tool not only contradicts this concept but adds unnecessary burden and costs to the industry and consequently has a negative impact on innovation, loss of competitive edge in the global standardisation. Euralarm therefore urges that, rather than changing today’s process, the stakeholders involved in European standardisation should continue to cooperate and strive for an innovative, and transparent market to deliver high quality products, systems, and services for the benefit of Europe’s society and economy.

About Euralarm

Euralarm represents the electronic fire and security industry, providing leadership and expertise for industry, market, policy makers and standards bodies. Our Members make society safer and secure through systems and services for fire detection and extinguishing, intrusion detection, access control, video monitoring, alarm transmission and alarm receiving centres. Founded in 1970, Euralarm represents over 5000 companies within the fire safety and security industry valued at 67 billion Euros. Euralarm Members are national associations and individual companies from across Europe.