EHFA submitted its response to the European consultation on VAT on 31 May 2011. The response was issued as a position paper.
VAT is not an obvious subject for a fitness association, and it was one of the more consequential. The rate applied to a service is part of the price the customer pays, and taking up exercise is discretionary spending, so what a government taxes and at what rate is part of what decides how many people can afford to use a facility. The framework within which that is settled is European: member states may apply reduced rates only within the categories the common VAT rules allow. How a fitness service is classified is therefore not a purely national question, and an argument about it had to be made in Brussels as well as in national capitals.
Consultations were among the few formal channels open to the sector. Fitness had no treaty basis of its own, sitting between sport and public health without being part of either, and its interests reached into policy areas - taxation, vocational training, health - that were written by other people. A written response was how the association got the sector's position into the record while a policy was still being drafted rather than after it had been made. See European affairs for the rest of that work.