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Find out how accreditation can help you deliver trust, innovation and contribute to a safer, healthier and easier world for people and organisations. Accreditation is the formal recognition that an organisation is competent to perform specific processes, activities, or tasks in a reliable, credible and accurate manner.
UKAS’s video explains how accreditation creates trust and confidence in the products and services we all rely upon. Find out more here:
Every aspect of daily life involves, at some level, adherence by someone to voluntary or mandatory standards. It is easy, perhaps, to think what some of these may be. Those related to food safety and labelling, for instance, or health and safety at work and in the home, weights and measures or trading standards. The implementation of many standards may seem less relevant to our immediate existence but will nonetheless impact on our everyday life, such as those related to the structural integrity of building materials, reliability of health care, management systems, financial advice and reporting, or the manufacture of clothing. Both standards and accreditation are primarily voluntary systems, but some aspects of accreditation are mandatory. In a number of areas it is therefore a requirement to obtain accreditation before offering certain services, in others it is a de facto ‘license’ to trade in as much as key purchasers expect suppliers to hold it.
Accreditation underpins practical applications of an increasingly wide range of activities across all sectors of the economy.
Accreditation is not simply a mechanism for demonstrating compliance and conformity however; it provides market differentiation and objective proof that an organisation complies with best practice. The process of seeking and maintaining accreditation is often invaluable in identifying improvements and efficiencies in policies and processes which can ultimately result in reduced overheads and running costs. A 2013 University of Birkbeck study concluded that accreditation contributed around £1bn to the UK economy each year.