Services Standards: Defining the Core Consumer Elements ... - ANEC

Hans-W. Micklitz
• expertise,
• legal language,
• democratic accountability.
Measured against these principles, the findings of the review process (the six
parameters – education and skills, equipment and premises, pre-contractual
stage and contract conclusion, content of contract, post-contractual stage,
monitoring and inspection), cannot be regarded as satisfactory.
None of the standards meet the requirement of completeness. They differ in the
degree to which they cover the six parameters. EC directives and regulations
may be ranked higher than the technical standards.
Innovation is a hard standard to meet. Whenever standardisation is retroactive,
innovation fails to appear. In these circumstances the legislator has set the
tone, not the Standards Bodies. There are, however, two notable exceptions to
be mentioned. The initiatives, taken by French and German Standards Bodies,
to lay down standards for residential homes for the elderly and for services for
resident people have opened up new perspectives outside and beyond
legislative requirements. The same is true for the European standards on
furniture removal which deal extensively with matters of defining and processing
quality.
EC directives and regulations are usually drafted by lawyers. If they are not
drafted by lawyers, they are counterchecked by lawyers. Technical standards
are not necessarily lying in the hands of lawyers. Without knowing who has
drafted what standard with what expertise, it is assumed that the vast majority
of the technical standards being studied here have not been drafted or reviewed
by lawyers. These standards suffer from a lack of legal expertise.
At a closer look it is striking to recognise that the EC directives and regulations,
in particular those which follow the new regulatory avenues, with new
techniques, including new regulators, suffer from a lack of legal precision.
Broadly framed concepts replace clear-cut rules. In this respect law making
approaches the language currently used in standard-making. Technical
standards look like laws and they make the users believe that they bear a
quasi-legal character by its proper wording. However, if one tests the message
behind cloudy stipulations, the results are not convincing at all.
Democratic accountability in standard-making is definitely underdeveloped.
Consumer representatives need to be granted a clear legal status, rights and
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