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

Services Standards
The Service Directive mentions “best efforts” in relation to Article 27 on dispute
settlement:
Member States shall take general measures necessary to ensure that providers
respond to the complaint referred to in the first subparagraph in the shortest
possible time and make their best efforts to find a satisfactory solution.
But the Directive does not indicate what it means.
The EC policy on the safety of services is somewhat more specific. Whilst the
notion of best practice is still missing in the application, it appears in the
research projects DG SANCO has initiated to meet the mandate of the Council
Resolution. One study is entitled “Assessment of Best Practice in Fairgrounds
and Amusement Parks in Relation to the Safety of Consumers” 294 . The outline of
the study to be undertaken, as formulated by the European Commission,
reiterates the notion of best practice without defining it 295 . The authors of the
study seem to understand best practice as the one which undertakes the most
comprehensive and deepest research on these specific risks and which is
regarded by experts as simply being the best available standard in that field.
In the working document on the intended revision of the New Approach on
standards 296 there is one reference to best practice in “market surveillance”:
Member States, it is suggested, shall have recourse to best practice and sound
management of resources. They must, in particular be able to detect serious
cases of non-conformity. Priority shall be given to the fields in which the
probability of risk is the highest or to cases which are of individual interests
(complaints, accidents).
The working document contains as Annex 1 a set of definitions. However, best
practice is not defined. All in all the notion of best practice is slowly gaining
pace, but no one has ever made an attempt to define it, at least not with regard
to standardisation.
a) Impact on standardisation of services
The integration of best practice into Service Directive 2006/123/EC can easily
be understood as a prolongation of a policy which the European Commission
began in the field of financial services. What the Commission has really done is
to transform best practice into a general principle that gains pace outside
financial service and turns into a common device for shaping the Internal
Market. At the same time, however, the strong economic efficiency bias is
294 http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_safe/serv_safe/reports/final_032005_en.pdf.
295 The outline is reprinted in the report.
296 European Commission, DG Enterprise, Certif doc 2005-16 Rev. 2, under 8.1.f) p. 21.
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