The new edition of the EN 81-20 and EN 81-50 standards has been published

The decision of the European Commission has recently been published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), which contains the updated EN 81-20 and EN 81-50 standards, edition 2020. The two new versions contain, as explicitly request from the Commission, a more precise Appendix ZA - including the list of the essential safety and health requirements of the directive and the individual clauses of the standard that satisfy them - and dated normative references; however, no substantial changes have been made regarding technical contents compared to the 2014 versions.

With the publication of the 2020 versions of EN 81-20 and EN 81-50, "STEP 1" is completed out of the three steps planned to overcome the criticality born in 2018 between the European Commission and CEN following the failure to publish 6 standards in the OJEU 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 provide for: the revision of the 6 standards mentioned above to update the references to the EN 81-20 / 50: 2020 standards and to implement as many comments as possible from the Commission on the specific parts of the standards (STEP 2) and finally, the complete alignment of the entire set of standards of the EN 81 series, therefore both the EN 81-20 standard and the supplementary standards, with the observations of the Commission and the HAS Consultant (STEP 3).

The representatives of EFESME and SBS are part of the task force set up within the technical committee CEN TC10 in charge of elaborating the new editions of the standard according to the STEP designed path in agreement with the Commission, and their presence guarantees that they are kept in due course, also taking into account the requests and interests of European lift SMEs. In the meantime, we will proceed to the preparation of the first draft of the ISO 8100-1 and ISO 8100-2 standards, ISO versions of EN 81-20 and EN 81-50, which will be discussed in detail in the next issue of Anacam Magazine, released in March 2021.

Annex I of the Commission decision contains the complete and updated list of the standards harmonized with the 2014/33 / EU Lifts Directive, which is identical to the last list published in the Official Journal in 2016, except for the 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, it should be noted that the consolidated list  of standards harmonized with the directive is available on the Commission's website, including the dates from which the assumed conformity comes into effect.