It is welcomed that compulsory accreditation of experts is recognised as inadequate to assure the quality of expert evidence (6.75-6.77). Courts would be in flight from their responsibilities if they were to rely on third-party assessment and not to use other tools to assess specific experts and evidence in each case.
While ISO standards for manufactured products may often be beneficial, ISO quality systems are contrary to the principles of the Better Regulation Executive (transparent, accountable, proportionate and consistent, and targeted according to need.) They are increasingly being recognised as poor standards:
"Without market-place coercion ISO 9000 would have withered long ago, for it has little inherent value...
"In the name of 'continuous improvement' the standards community has revised the Standard four times since 1979, yet it remains a fundamentally flawed concept."
http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/6-22.asp
John Seddon describes the origin of the problem here:
http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/3-1-article.asp
Another authority has correctly written:
"What is susceptible to meaningful accreditation is an individual's expertise, and that is best done by his own professional regulatory body.....But we believe that the Regulator's proposal to impose UKAS accreditation against his Quality Standard on all providers is untargeted, disproportionate and potentially anti-competitive.
"Accreditation may SEEM to offer users of forensic science services and enhanced level of confidence that all evidence, regardless of the supplier, is quality assured and directly comparable. However, the truth is that accreditation can never assure quality because quality comes from every individual's ongoing rigorous and error-free implementation of proper procedures; a priori accreditation can on give us some measure of past performance......It is far better for the court to determine if the Regulator's Quality Standards have been followed on a case-by-case basis than for accreditation of a provider and its employees to become and easy proxy for the scrutiny that should be applied properly in every case."
http://tinyurl.com/cuhrxd
(http://www.jspubs.com/downloads/PDFs/UKREW_FSR_Apr09.pdf)
In some cases, ISO/UKAS accreditation is enforced by European legislation and already excludes the evidence of non-accredited laboratories and experts from being weighed by the courts. UKAS purports to assure precise measurement but ultimately can offer only "confidence," an emotional and unscientific value. The organisation has limited understanding of forensic and clinical issues and is beginning to stray into attempting to supplant the discretion of the court regarding certain samples. It is currently in danger of preventing legitimate results being brought before courts for assessment.
UKAS is very expensive, adding perhaps a third to costs. Its costs are vastly disproportionate to any benefit it brings. If it were a medical treatment, would there be evidence for its use to be permitted by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence? If there is no evidence, why does it continue to be enforced at great expense to public and private services?
Management and medical professionals and organisations have been duped by the prima facie plausibility of the ISO/UKAS approach which mistakes compliance with protocols for quality which is much harder to define.
The legal profession should avoid this error, strive to reverse the anti-competitive marketplace coercion requiring compulsory UKAS accreditation, and sidestep the trap of using it as an inappropriate shortcut to determining the facts in individual cases.