Free tool · Checker
Do the standards on your declaration still count?
A designated standard stops conferring presumption of conformity on a published date, and nothing writes to tell you. The whole of the government’s list travels inside this page, so what you paste never leaves your browser.
The short answer
Every designated standard on the government’s lists either has a cessation date or it does not. Past that date the citation confers nothing, and a declaration relying on it is not carrying what it says it carries. Nobody is notified — the list is simply republished. So the check is: find each reference you cite, read its cessation date, and work backwards from it, because buying the successor and re-testing is the slow part.
Presumption of conformity is the thing a designated standard buys you. Build to the standard, cite it on the declaration, and an enforcement officer starts from the position that the essential requirements are met. It is worth real money, and it has an expiry date printed in a spreadsheet almost nobody reads.
The dangerous state is not the expired one. It is the eighteen months before: the standard still works, the product still passes, the paperwork still looks right, and the date sits in a column on a GOV.UK page nobody opened. Then it passes, and nothing changes on your desk at all.
Paste what your declaration cites
One reference per line, with the edition — presumption attaches to the reference as cited, so “EN 149” and “EN 149:2001+A1:2009” are not the same claim. Nothing you paste leaves this page.
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What the answers mean
- Stopped counting. The cessation date has passed. Units already placed on the market are not undone — the law does not reach backwards — but a declaration signed against that reference today is not carrying what it claims.
- Ends soon. There is a date and it is ahead. Work back from it rather than forward from today: buying the successor standard, re-testing and re-issuing is the long pole, and lab capacity does not compress because you left it late.
- Not found is the one to read first, not the one to skip. It usually means a typo, a reference for a market these lists do not cover, or a standard taken off the list altogether — and that last one is worse than an expiry, because an expiry at least has a documented date to show an auditor.
- Needs the edition. Presumption attaches to the reference as cited. “EN 149” and “EN 149:2001+A1:2009” are different claims, and a declaration that names a standard without its edition is under-specified whatever today’s dates say.
- Needs the regulation. The same standard is designated under more than one regulation, and the lists give it different dates. Naming yours in the second field resolves it.
- No end date today is the best answer available, and it is not a clean bill of health. A cessation date appears when a successor is cited. Today’s answer is about today.
Why this page has no server
A declaration of conformity names your product, your standards and often your test house. It is commercially sensitive and there is no version of this tool worth building that uploads one. So the entire corpus — 3,517 standards across thirteen lists — is embedded in the page you are reading, and the matching runs in your browser. Open the network tab and watch: nothing you paste generates a request, and once the page has loaded you can disconnect and use it anyway. Every tool here works that way, and the site’s own test suite fails the build if one of them acquires a way to phone home.
What we would actually build for you
Not this. This is a spot check, and a spot check is the wrong shape for the problem: the risk is not the reference you thought to look up, it is the one you did not. The useful version watches the lists, notices the day a reference you rely on acquires a date, and writes to the person whose name is on the declaration — with the row, the source and what changed.
That is the same machine we build for a mortgage broker watching lender criteria, or a letting agent watching a licensing register: an agent that reads a public source on a schedule, works out whether the change catches you specifically, and can show its working when somebody asks. The audit trail is the product — a monitor that cannot say why it fired is a monitor nobody trusts twice.
What this tool does not do
It does not reproduce a word of any standard, because ISO, IEC and BSI text is licensed and we have not licensed it — it names the reference and links to the list. It does not cover the EU harmonised standards, which are published separately in the Official Journal and no longer move in step with the British lists. And it is not a conformity assessment: it reports what one government list says about one reference on one day, which is a much smaller claim than “you are compliant”.
Questions people actually ask
What is a cessation date on a designated standard?
It is the date on which citing that standard stops conferring presumption of conformity. Before it, an enforcement officer starts from the position that the essential requirements are met; after it, the citation confers nothing and the manufacturer is back to demonstrating conformity some other way. The date is published in the consolidated list and nobody is individually notified when one appears.
Does my declaration become invalid the moment a standard is withdrawn?
Not retrospectively. Products already placed on the market under a valid declaration are not undone by a later cessation date. What changes is forward-looking: a declaration signed against that citation after the date is not carrying the presumption it claims, and that is what an enforcement officer or a customer’s auditor will look at.
Does anything I paste here get sent anywhere?
No. The whole list of 3,517 standards is embedded in this page, and the matching runs in your browser. There is no server behind it to send a declaration to. The page counts its own views — an anonymous page count — the URL, the referrer, and a coarse country and device type, with no cookie and no identifier of any kind — and nothing you paste is part of that. Disconnect once it has loaded and it still works. The site’s test suite fails the build if any tool acquires a way to phone home.
Do these dates apply in the EU as well?
No, and assuming they do is a common and expensive mistake. Great Britain publishes designated standards; the EU publishes harmonised standards in the Official Journal. They were the same lists once and they have diverged since, so a reference can be live in one and lapsed in the other. This tool covers the British lists only and says so on every row.
Sources
- GOV.UK designated standards — all thirteen consolidated lists, read through the GOV.UK content API and parsed from the published OpenDocument spreadsheets. 3,517 standards, of which 699 carry a cessation date and 65 of those deadlines are still ahead. The nearest is 8 October 2026 (EN 12941:1998 and EN 12942:1998, personal protective equipment). source ↗ — the primary source, published by the department that maintains it re-checked every 6 months
- No standard’s text is reproduced anywhere on this page. ISO, IEC and BSI documents are licensed publications; this tool names the reference, reports what the government list says about it, and links to the list. Buying the standard itself is a separate transaction we take no part in and earn nothing from. — a limitation we chose, stated rather than worked around
- Cessation dates are read exactly as published and are never rolled forward off a weekend or a bank holiday. A court deadline moves under CPR 2.8(5); presumption of conformity does not — it stops on the date the list gives. — our reading of the rule, stated so it can be argued with
Checked 8 September 2026. Next scheduled check 7 March 2027. Numbers that move — leaderboards, live indices — are re-checked every 30 days; annual datasets and rules in force every six months; dated research once a year. If something here has gone stale before we got to it, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.
The useful version of this watches the list for you.
A spot check finds the reference you thought to look up. The risk is the one you did not. If you are tracking more than a handful of standards across more than one regulation, that is a monitor — and it should write to a named person with the row, the source and what changed.
Start the conversationOr read what that actually involves: Compliance evidence work.