EHFA held its second EU policy forum with the European Commission in January 2009, and the proceedings were made available from the secretariat. The forum was the association's structured occasion for putting the sector's position to Commission officials directly, rather than through consultation responses alone.
The notice was published on 22 January 2009, and the forum itself was held in Brussels on 11 February 2009, on issues concerning VAT and health.
The policy ground the association occupied was narrow but important. Fitness sat awkwardly between sport, which had its own treaty basis and its own budget line, and public health, which had neither. The practical consequence was that the sector was largely invisible in European policy even though its work touched the same inactivity and obesity problems that health policy was trying to address.
EHFA's argument was that exercise professionals were part of the health workforce, and that a qualification framework was what made them countable as such. The same argument ran through the association's responses to consultations and through its European affairs work.
VAT gave the forum a concrete subject. Rates are set by national governments inside a European framework, so the treatment of a gym membership or a training course could differ from one member state to the next, and the sector's case had to be made in Brussels and in national capitals at the same time. The association returned to the question in 2011, when it answered a European Commission consultation on VAT: EU consultation on VAT.