News article • 2 mins read
Within the European cooperation for Accreditation the responsibility for managing the multilateral agreement (MLA) lies with the Multilateral Agreement Council (MAC). At its 40th meeting in Budapest on the 3rd October 2018 the MAC considered the report relating to the UKAS peer evaluation in mid-June. This was an additional evaluation, with the dual aim of evaluating UKAS’s approach to the accreditation of reference material producers with the intention of us becoming a signatory to the new EA MLA being developed in this field, and also evaluating that our management system had been appropriately updated to comply with the new requirements of ISO/IEC 17011:2017 (the standard used for the operation of an accreditation body). The decision of the MAC was unanimous in making positive decisions on both counts. As a consequence UKAS has become the first EA accreditation body to be recognised for compliance with ISO/IEC 17011:2017, and also is amongst the first accreditation bodies to receive a positive decision for signing the MLA for accreditation of Reference Material (RM) producers. The intention of EA is that the new EA MLA for RM producers will be launched at the next MAC meeting to be held in Reykjavik in May 2019, and therefore UKAS will not be recognised as a signatory in this field until this time.