Draft EU Regulation amending fees and charges payable to the European Chemicals Agency

This draft Commission Implementing Regulation revises the fees and charges payable to ECHA for the submission of authorisation applications and review reports of authorisations.

Article 74(3) of Regulation (EU) No 1907/2006 (REACH) provides that the structure and amount of the fees shall take account of the work required by that Regulation to be carried out by ECHA. In line with the Article 22(2) of Regulation (EC) No 340/2008, a review was carried out. The experience gained so far by the Agency and its Committees for Risk Assessment and for Socio-economic Analysis in assessing applications for authorisation has shown that the amount of work involved in such an assessment is driven by the number of uses applied for in one application, rather than the number of applicants having jointly submitted the application. Consequently, the fee applicable to a given application should be the same, regardless of the number of applicants; no additional fee should be levied for each additional applicant. 

The same reasoning applies also to the charges for submission of any review report. In addition, modifying the fees and charges accordingly could ease the financial burden for smaller operators, such as small and medium-sized enterprises, when applying for authorisation jointly. Furthermore, the additional fees and charges applicable per additional use should be only slightly lower than the amount of the basic fee or charge. Those additional fees or charges per additional use should therefore be increased.

Final date for comments: 16 February 2018.

Link to Draft Regulation and Annex.