What is UKAS?
The United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) is the government appointed national accreditation body for the UK, who assess a laboratory’s testing services in accordance with the requirements of ISO 17025. 3
Whether you are in the product development phase of your project, looking for a lab for development work or you require compliance testing to national/international environmental test standards, a UKAS accredited test lab will provide key benefits.
A UKAS accredited lab will have shown that they comply to the requirements of ISO 17025: General Requirements for the Competence of Testing and Calibration Laboratories.
Yearly audits are performed by UKAS which includes the assessment of both the Quality Management System and the Technical Competence of the laboratory, in accordance with ISO 17025 and the environmental test standards that the laboratory includes on their schedule of accreditation.
This then allows transparency between test labs, ensuring quality, accuracy and repeatability.
The number of environmental test standards is vast and it would not be possible to list all in the schedule of accreditation of a laboratory.
Labs will therefore include the most common standards in their schedule, each standard having been assessed during an audit.
However, this does not then mean that the test standard that you need to gain compliance to cannot be performed if it does not appear on a lab schedule.
The lab would simply perform a GAP analysis between this standard and the standards that are on their schedule.
If the requirements of this standard are already covered by a standard that is on their schedule, then the laboratory can state that the testing is a UKAS accredited test.