BOA achieves CE Marking

The steelwork industry in the UK is facing the biggest shake up in its history following the introduction of the Construction Products Regulations on 1st July 2014, which makes it a legal requirement for all structural steelwork supplied to the construction market to carry a CE Mark.

The legislation states that fabricators in the UK that are manufacturing structural steelwork for the construction must now have their Factory Production Control and Welding Management Systems audited to the requirements of BS EN 1090-1.2009+A1 2011 and BS EN ISO 3834 in order to be able to issue a Declaration of Performance of its Welded Structural Steel Components. Companies that fail to achieve this standard and continue to trade without it, will be liable to prosecution by the Office of Fair Trading.

All very scary stuff, but what does it mean?

In a nutshell, the new law means that if you ignore the above, you will not be able to carry on trading. If you decide to ignore the law and trade anyway, you will be breaking the law and at risk of receiving a stop notice, hefty fines and prosecution.

So, as you can see, it’s a major event in the industry and any fabricator that cannot achieve the standard, or simply chooses not to bother, is putting themselves at massive risk of not being able to trade in the future.

With this change in the market being in the pipeline for the last two years, most competent contractors (BoA included) have been working to ensure their compliance come 1^st July 2014, but anecdotal evidence coming from within the industry suggest that as little of 15% of the market will be ready to comply with the regulations on the day it is introduced. As such, the market for structural steelwork contractors is likely to shrink significantly in the short to medium term.

Whilst not liable to prosecution, end users are obliged to make sure that their contractors are compliant, otherwise they run the risk of receiving illegal goods onto their sites, as well as the risk of their non-compliant contractor having stop notices served on them mid-contract. Therefore, making sure that your steelwork contractor is compliant to the new law is going to be critical to ensuring projects are not disrupted.

At Barretts of Aspley, we have been working for the last two years to ensure that we are compliant with the new legislation and are delighted to announce that on 17^th June 2014 we were awarded CE Certificate of Conformity of Factory Production Control No. 1224-CPR-0541.

As such, customers can continue to place orders with Barretts of Aspley, safe in the knowledge that the products they are receiving are fully compliant with the new legislation.