New edition of standards EN 81-20 and EN 81-50 published in the OJEU

A few days ago, the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) published the decision of the European Commission containing the updated references of standards EN 81-20 and EN 81-50, in a new 2020 version. The two new versions contain, as per the Commission's explicit request, 1. a more precise Annex ZA - the Annex listing the essential health and safety requirements (EHSRs) of the Directive, as well as the individual clauses of the standard that satisfy them - and 2. dated normative references. On the other hand, as far as, the technical contents are concerned, no substantial changes have been made compared to the 2014 versions. The publication of the 2020 versions of EN 81-20 and EN 81-50 concludes "STEP 1" out of the three planned to overcome the criticality that arose in 2018 between the European Commission and CEN in the aftermath of the non-publication in the OJEU of no less than 6 standards of the EN 81 series revised by CEN (EN 81-21, EN 81-28, EN 81-58, EN 81-70, EN 81-71, EN 81-77). The other two steps are still ongoing and foresee: the revision of the 6 standards mentioned above to update their references to EN 81-20/50:2020 and to implement as many as possible of the Commission's comments on the specific parts of the standards (STEP 2); and the complete alignment of the whole family of standards of the EN 81 series, therefore both EN 81-20 and the supplementary standards, to the comments of the Commission and the HAS Consultant (STEP 3). The representatives of EFESME and SBS are part of the task force (TF HAS) set up within the framework of the CEN TC10 technical committee in charge of the elaboration of the new editions of the standards, according to the step path agreed with the Commission, and their presence ensures that the requests and interests of the European lift SMEs are taken into due account. Annex I of the Commission Decision contains the complete and updated list of harmonised standards to the Lift Directive 2014/33/EU, which is also identical to the last list published in the Official Journal in 2016, except for the inclusion of EN 81-20:2020 and EN 81-50:2020, which replace the 2014 versions. The references of the latter are given in Annex II, as they may continue to be used for a transitional period of 18 months, until 27 July 2022. Finally, the consolidated list of standards harmonised with the directive is available on the Commission's website, including the dates from which presumption of conformity takes effect.