Just starting?
If you are new to providing online application forms for licences, the pages referenced here will help you familiarise yourself with the legal background, show you the steps you need to take to comply with the Services Directive, and provide you with links to help material.
What is the Services Directive and what does it mean for my authority?
The EU Services Directive aims to break down barriers to cross-border trade in services between countries in the EU by making it easier for service providers, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, to offer their services to customers in other EU countries.
EU Member states were required to implement the Directive by 28 December 2009. BIS has led on implementation in the UK and has established an online ‘Point of Single Contact’ for service providers to find out about doing business in the UK.
Complying with the Services Directive means ensuring that service providers throughout the EU are able to apply for in-scope licences online. UK competent authorities have a choice of providing their online forms on their own website or, in collaboration with Business Link, on the UKWelcomes website as well as the businesslink.gov.uk website.
For further background information, please read our Services Directive section.
What do I have to do to be compliant?
This website is aimed at helping authorities, whether using their own or ELMS forms, to walk through the process of becoming fully compliant with the Services Directive.
A very good place to start is the Task list, which presents a checklist of items your authority needs to complete to comply.
Task guidelines
The most important tasks to start with are task 4 (for local authorities only), task 5, task 8, task 9, task 10 and task 14.
- Task 5 and task 8 should be the first tasks you complete. Working through the spreadsheets should take no more than a day for each task, and upon submission, the information is entered into our system within the next fortnight.
- Task 10 is also very important and this task, together with task 4 and task 9, should take only a few minutes each. Please note that it takes about a week for the changes to be made on our end once you’ve submitted your information.
- Task 14 can be done parallel to the other tasks.
Where can I find help?
Help is available in many forms on the ELMS portal.
It is highly advisable that before you start working through the tasks, you explore our Training pages. In the Training documentation section, pay particular attention to the Administrator and Operational user overviews, and the guides to administrator tasks and operational user tasks. We also offer a set of video tutorials, which show you step by step how to accomplish various stages of the compliance process. Finally, you will likely benefit from signing up to one of our regularly offered webinars, which are live, online demonstrations of how to operate ELMS from an administrator's point of view. You will connect online and via the phone with our Technical Support Analyst, who will then either give you a general introduction or guide you through the areas you find problematic.
We also offer an extensive FAQ section with questions and answers broken down by topics and tasks. Here, you can request edits to questions and/or answers as well as propose a new ‘frequently asked question’.
If you have read through documentation and tried the other training options listed above and still need help, have a read through our Contacts page to find the appropriate channel to direct your enquiry to.
Last updated: 11 Feb 2011, 11:22