Ex-post evaluation of the application of the market surveillance provisions of Regulation (EC) No 765/2008

Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 aims at strengthening the protection of public interests, through reducing the number of non-compliant products on the EU Internal Market, and at ensuring a level playing field among economic operators, providing a framework for market surveillance and controls of products. The evaluation aimed at understanding to what extent the Regulation has achieved these objectives. Moreover, it analysed the Regulation's practical implementation in the EU Member States and assessed the market for products in its scope. The evaluation concluded that the Regulation is not fully effective in achieving its objectives. Moreover, it has a limited cost effectiveness due to its partial achievement of both expected results and impacts, and to both resources allocated to enforcement and related activities not being correlated to the size of surveyed markets. The needs addressed by the Regulation are still relevant, although there exist a number of issues that could call this into question, particularly with respect to increasing online trade and budgetary constraints at national level. Moreover, the scope of the Regulation is not fully clear and its market surveillance provisions suffer from a lack of specificity. This allowed for different implementations at the national level, which impact on the level of uniformity and rigorousness of market surveillance controls across the EU. Finally, the coherence of the Regulation with respect to the GPSD and sectoral directives is not straightforward and this reduces the clarity of the overall framework for market surveillance