As stressed in the 2004 “Kok report” on the Lisbon strategy for growth and employment, “it is vital that Europe retains a strong industrial and manufacturing base as a crucial component of a balanced approach to economic growth”. In order to stay competitive companies need a stable regulatory environment and legislation, which is as simple and as usable as possible. Unfortunately, our industry is faced with a growing number of unco-ordinated legislative proposals, which are complex, overlapping and, in our opinion, would lead to incoherent regulatory packages. These bureaucratic measures and rigid legislation inevitably have an impact on the competitiveness and innovation capacity of EU manufacturers as they not only affect products but also more and more manufacturing processes and conditions.

Orgalime promotes harmonised and full transposition of EU legislation and strives for an improvement in the legal framework conditions that are key to restoring loyalty to the EU single market and level-playing field conditions for our companies. In particular, Orgalime supports the New Approach principles and the use of harmonised standards that provide manufacturers with both flexibility in fulfilling regulatory objectives and legal certainty in order to remain competitive and innovative. Orgalime acts as a gatekeeper against attempts to add administrative burden on companies without demonstrated benefit for society. Equally, it fights against unequal conditions of trade due to the unfair competition engendered by non-compliant or counterfeit products that the combined effects of global free trade and poor controls by customs and market surveillance authorities.