Mapping product regulations to trade and production dictionaries

The Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) was created in January 2018 by the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Responsibilities of The Office include: a. Giving detailed advice on the interpretation of safety related regulations, and sits on many standards making committees. b. Responding to incidents where the safety of a consumer product is called into question. c. Offering policy advice to HMG on product safety issues. d. Enforcement of a wide range of other product standards and regulations, for instance Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), Construction Products, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), and Timber regulations.

The project detailed here is being recruited as part of the OPSS Research Programme that was launched in March 2018. This programme provides high quality strategic research to strengthen the evidence base for OPSS policy development, delivery and enforcement, giving business the confidence to innovate and protecting consumers from unsafe products. The wide range of evidence-based research supported by the Research Programme helps to address critical questions relating to current product safety, and/or issues that might arise due to future market developments.

OPSS holds policy and regulatory responsibility for a wide range of non-food consumer products. Many of these are EU-derived under the 'New Approach' framework, now transferred into UK law following EU Exit; while others have always been held domestically. Around 59 different regulations fall within scope (a full list is below) and a number of products fall within each regulation. Some products may fall within more than one regulation. BEIS also has responsibility for policy development, implementation, international negotiations and stakeholder engagement for UK Conformity Assessed (UKCA) applicable products. This research will produce evidence that is essential to enable government to make informed decisions about this type of product regulation. BEIS/OPSS will have a comprehensive and definitive list of product codes across a number of different data dictionaries. We will be able to create a firmer idea of the scale and activity of the markets we regulate; plus we will be able to drill into activity at certain ports of interest and even by Government region.

Further information is available within the additional information field.

Additional information: The aim of this work is to provide information that maps consumer product regulations to a number of different trade and production dictionaries.

Specifically, the objectives for this research are to: 1) map the products under these regulations to trade and production data dictionaries, such as Harmonised Standard (HS) and Combined Nomenclature (CN) codes (latest editions). These are used to categorise products in trade data, used internationally to identify common or similar products; 2) map these regulations across to manufacturing datasets like the ONS ProdCom publication, which uses a different product code structure; 3) identify the types of businesses most likely to be involved in the manufacture or retail of products captured under the regulations, using the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) framework; 4) assess whether products that are mapped to regulations, require conformity assessment from a third-party body (known as Approved Bodies or Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs)).

We would like to invite prospective bidders to attend a pre-market engagement session on 2nd December 2022 at 10am, via MS Teams. Should you wish to attend, please register your interest using the contact details above.