EU and UK business organisations met in February 2025 to discuss practical measures to reduce technical barriers to EU-UK trade.
Recognising the shared nature of challenges faced by industry in the EU and UK, the discussion identified a mutual recognition agreement on conformity assessment as a desirable outcome of the forthcoming discussions between the parties.
Such an agreement would bring mutual benefits including increased stability in regulatory environments, which brings confidence to business investment and enables scalability and the avoidance of duplicative conformity assessments for EU and UK businesses who want to trade into both markets.
Lowering compliance costs in this way supports export-led growth, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises, and greater availability of conformity assessment bodies to EU and UK businesses for regulatory purposes, building capacity, capability and increasing competition.
The common goal of industry on both sides is to achieve efficient market access with as few administrative and bureaucratic hurdles as possible.
In this regard, EU and UK business organisations recognised a mutual recognition agreement on conformity assessment as practical and deliverable, because:
- it can be delivered alongside other industry-focused measures or can act as a standalone ‘mini deal’, outside the EU-UK Trade & Cooperation Agreement.
- it is scalable over time, allowing an initial agreement to be reached on selected sectors and then built up.
- UKAS, is assessed to the same requirements as EU Member State National Accreditation Bodies as a signatory to the European co-operation for Accreditation multilateral agreement; this facilitates the technical recognition of equivalence of accredited conformity assessment.
Considering the ambition to deepen the trading relationship, and the upcoming EU-UK Summit on 19 May, these signatories have called on the EU and the UK to pursue a mutual recognition agreement on conformity assessment, recognising it as a practical and achievable measure to reduce unnecessary barriers to trade.
