Foreword of the Board of Supervisors

This is the public report of the RvA for 2015. It is a report in which the RvA gives insight into its work in an accessible way and renders account for it: checking the expertise, impartiality and independence of organisations which inspect, certify and test in order to support the confidence of society in the quality of products and services. This important work has been performed well for twenty years.

Obviously it cannot be prevented that now and then things do go wrong. After all, we are only human. Accredited organisations are responsible for their own management. They cannot shift this to the RvA or to the official inspection bodies. However, they are not responsible for the standards and laws that determine how they have to do their work. Sometimes these are determined by politics, sometimes by ‘the market’. Standards which were appropriate at the moment they were drawn up, don’t always appear later on to accord with the perception of society. This does not mean that accredited organisations don’t do their work properly, as is sometimes suggested, but that the respective standards and the suppliers of products and services did not develop sufficiently along with the needs of society.

The Board of Supervisors find it striking that discussions about abuses are often not held on the basis of an inventory of causes in a broader context and that the extent of the problem is seldom quantified. In the exceptional cases where this does happen, we see few ambitious objectives for improvement, and little management of the government departments to achieve improvements in the broader system in collaboration with the players in the field. Whether we are talking about food safety, the so-called ‘defeat devices’ (sjoemelsoftware), asbestos or high-speed trains, the solution always appears to be sought in individual players and the total system of quality assurance, supervision and enforcement is hardly taken into consideration. In fact this in particular is what should give society confidence that all is well with the products and services they enjoy.

As the Board of Supervisors we keep our finger on the pulse of how the RvA deals with all those interests, optimises its management, responds to signals from society and looks for the dialogue, without losing sight of its special role.

It only remains to be said that in 2015 we performed our duties with pleasure.

On behalf of the Board of Supervisors,

Drs. E.H.T.M. Nijpels Chairman