Ms Sarah Neary:

I thank the joint committee for giving us the opportunity to present the construction products regulations, CPR, and I hope we will clarify any issue arising in their implementation in Ireland.

There are three areas mentioned in the committee's letter that I want to cover. I will explain briefly the CPR and their legal status and deal with the issue of how they affect the standard of construction products on the market in Ireland.

The main goal of the CPR is to reduce technical barriers to trade across Europe in construction products. The regulations will do this by creating technical specifications or standards for individual construction products. They are written at European level and use common technical language which harmonises test methods, the methods for declaring on performance and the methods used in third party assessment of construction products. Therefore, when they are placed on the market, the characteristics of products should be the same across Europe, whether one is in Sweden, Germany or Ireland.

The CPR make it mandatory, when a product is covered by these specifications or standards, for a declaration of performance to be made and a CE mark will be affixed to the product. The manufacturer is responsible for these and the information contained in them. Once one sees the CE mark on a construction product, one knows it has been through this process and that the information is in accordance with the CPR and any other Union harmonisation legislation applying to it. The CPR envisage everybody across the construction sector using this common technical language. As regulators of the building regulations, we use these standards and specifications. Users will use them to choose between products, while manufacturers will provide the information which can be considered reliable. That is the concept behind the regulations.

In terms of legal status, the regulations were adopted in 2011 and came into effect in Ireland on 1 July this year. They repealed the construction products directive, CPD. They build on many of the instruments established under the CPD. They are in the interests of simplifying and clarifying the use of the CE mark for construction products.

We needed to bring forward national legislation to police the construction products regulations and provide for market surveillance. We can go through these issues in more detail. SI 225 designates local building control authorities as the market surveillance authorities and provides them with powers. It requires them to authorise persons to carry out inspections and investigative work. It also provides for the corrective actions to be taken, if a problem occurs or there is an offence. Defences and penalties are also included. There is market surveillance at a national level in accordance with national regulations. There are also voluntary measures in which we are involved at European level. Where a product is deemed to be high risk, it is dealt with through the provision of a RAPEX notice which is issued by various member states. We can go into that matter in more detail, if the committee wishes.

On the third topic, the impact on the quality of construction products in Ireland, the standards and specifications from the European Union are very different from what we have relied on in national standards.

The European standards harmonise the tests, the assessment methods and the declaration a manufacturer makes but not the performance the product must meet. In this regard the National Standards Authority of Ireland, NSAI, has gone through a process of producing national guidance for some of the European standards to maintain the Irish or British standards we would have been familiar with using here. They have a process in place and are about half way through the harmonised standards issued to date, of which there are approximately 400 or 500, to assess if any more national guidance is needed.

The CE mark is about putting a product on the market. When the product is used, it is the responsibility of the designers or the professionals involved, and the builders, as to how it is used appropriately. That is where the building regulations or the NRA specification come in because they are the national rules that apply. There is a gap between the European system and what we were used to previously with Irish and British standards but the NSAI is in the process of reviewing that.