What changed between the plenary report and the adopted text

Removed:EXPLANATORY STATEMENT

Removed:The right to repair proposal

Removed:The proposal by the European Commission for common rules promoting the repair of goods aims at making repair of defective products more attractive and thus at increasing the amount of consumer goods getting repaired instead of being thrown away. Several studies and surveys have shown that consumers have a positive attitude towards repairing goods. Therefore, the Rapporteur wishes to support those trends in consumer as well as business behaviour and to promote the so-called right to repair. The report follows the lines of the Commission proposal to enable consumer participation in the Green Transition towards a sustainable and circular economy. In this regard, the Rapporteur believes the report to be complementary to the legislative proposals on Ecodesign Requirements for Sustainable Products and Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition.

Removed:Incentivising repair within the legal guarantee

Removed:The report aims at clarifying central elements of the proposal and at increasing the level of ambition. Consumer legislation should encourage the repair of defective products. Therefore, the Rapporteur suggests improving the attractiveness of repair within the legal guarantee period under the Sales of Goods Directive by a timely repair and a requirement of a loan product for consumers if the repair will take an unnecessarily long time. To further increase the attractiveness of repair, the legal guarantee period of repaired goods should be extended. This is not only a matter of sustainability but also of legal clarity. Thus, the Rapporteur proposes as a one-off measure to extend the legal guarantee period by additional twelve months once a product is brought back to conformity via a repair. As consumers are very time sensitive when it comes to the repair of their goods, the Rapporteur proposes that consumers can directly address producers for repairing defective products. Meeting the repair request by the producer will discharge the seller from his/her liability for conformity vis-à-vis the consumer under the Sales of Goods Directive without creating a separate legal relationship between the consumer and the producer.

Removed:Creating a repair market

Removed:For products whose defect is, in terms of time or in terms of scope, not covered by the legal guarantee under the Sales of Goods Directive, the report proposes to strengthen the right of repair for consumers. In the Rapporteur’s view, the right to repair is no appendix to product regulation such as the Ecodesign Regulation. It does not intend to remedy a market failure and the right’s scope should therefore, as a matter of principle, not be limited to product categories where market dynamics have not led to properly reparable products. Yet, the right to repair becomes practically meaningless if producers of products, for which there are no legal reparability requirements in Union legal acts yet, can successfully rely on factual or legal impossibility. The Rapporteur therefore supports the positive list approach proposed by the Commission, according to which products that are subject to the right to repair are explicitly mentioned in an annex. Yet, after careful consideration, the Rapporteur nevertheless decided to extend the scope in his report to a category of products that are reparable without any legal reparability requirements and where consumers’ claims to repair will be met by producers as well as independent repairers without any specific product regulation, which are bicycles. Additionally, triggers for more competition in after-sales situations are included. Not only should producers provide all end-users with spare parts and information for the repair but they should also prevent prohibitive and discriminatory pricing for spare parts. This strengthens the independent repair market and empowers consumers to choose other repair service providers than producers. Together with the supplementing instruments proposed by the Commission’s proposal such as the online platform and the repair information form that should in the eyes of the Rapporteur be a voluntary one in order to prevent additional burdens for businesses, independent repairers will be put into a position where they can compete with traditional producers. Finally and in order to make repair affordable for all citizens, the report wants Member States to introduce measures, such as repair vouchers or reduced VAT rates for repair services, that will increase demand for repair services and thereby kick-start the repair economy. In sum, empowering consumers to have their goods repaired and creating a proper repair market will truly support the ambition to create a circular and climate neutral economy.