The Survivor’s Trust gains crucial new accreditation as inspection body

The Survivor’s Trust (TST) is a national membership organisation providing vital specialist support to over 100,000 survivors of rape and sexual violence in the UK each year. Members of TST, mostly charitable organisations, are completely independent of the police and provide a range of services including counselling, helplines and advocacy services for men, women, non-binary people and children.

TST members are finding that demand on their services is at an all-time high, while available funding remains overly stretched, leading to an estimated 5% of services being forced to close within the last three years. TST provides a lifeline to member services, offering infrastructure support, networking and representation to member agencies, allowing them to focus on providing their services. In turn, member agencies work to TST’s National Service Standards, which provides assurance of consistent quality and service delivery.

Following a recent pilot project with UKAS, TST is now able to offer accredited inspection services to members, having received its grant of accreditation to ISO/IEC 17020 as an inspection body. Achieving this has been a collaborative process between UKAS and TST, agreeing an acceptable assessment approach, ensuring UKAS’s inspection of Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCs) aligns with the specialised needs of TST’s member services, as well as providing a unified approach to quality assurance inspection across statutory and third-sector service provision.

TST Inspection Team Manager, Christine Sharif, commented on the recent achievement of the TST team:

“Having achieved UKAS accreditation is a huge milestone for TST. The importance of national service standards being collaboratively owned, steered and developed by the sector for the sector, ensures that the diverse and specialised knowledge within it continues to focus on the varied needs of service users. This further enhances the credibility of and confidence in services that comply with national service standards.”

Head of Development and Scheme Integrity at UKAS, Louise Sanders, made the following comment on this development:

“Developing this new accreditation was challenging, however the process was also incredibly satisfying as UKAS and TST worked together in a truly collaborative manner, unified by the excellent goals of the organisation. TST has always supported members in providing critical services, now this offering has been enhanced, having demonstrated that it meets the requirements as outlined by ISO/IEC 17020.”