The importance of using accredited laboratories to be sure you comply with legislation and technical regulations

Accreditation of testing houses and testing laboratories ensures the competence, independence and impartiality of testing organisations. It also ensures repeatability and reproducibility of test results as well as a wider acceptance of test reports, across countries and regions.

Accredited labs are more and more used in the regulatory fields in societies with a robust quality infrastructure such as Europe, the US, Canada, Japan, Korea or Australia. Accreditation facilitates that public authorities can delegate certain control tasks to external organisations, both private and public. In such cases, the public authority or public administration needs a trustable mechanism to ensure the competence of such bodies to which they are delegating certain control activities.

In such a case, it is necessary to guarantee that the competence, independence, impartiality of such bodies are maintained over time. That's why it is important to rely on accredited testing houses or testing laboratories, to be sure that the results are acceptable and trustable.

At a European Level (EU and EFTA), the European Commission and other European authorities are making a more extensive use of accreditation. European Member States are strongly advised to make use of accreditation, as it facilitates the mutual recognition of the testing services provided.

Being aware of the importance of accreditation for companies, the Website Genorma.com has established the first Pan-European search engine to facilitate the identification of accredited testing houses in Europe.