The new European Standard EN16636 – Requirements and recommendations for the provision of pest management services has achieved 100% approval in the official voting process which concluded on 9 December.
Announcing the achievement yesterday (January 13) in the latest CEPA e-news, CEPA chair, Bertrand Montmoreau, says: “I take great pride in announcing that our European Standard for the Provision of Pest Management Services was approved after peer reviewing by 17 European Standard Institutes.
| “I wish to thank and congratulate every CEPA member who contributed to the CEN Technical Committee 404 for their input and their share in this successful outcome. Work on the development of the European Standard for the Provision of Pest Management Services began on 30 July 2010. It took CEN Committee TC 404, composed of members from contributing National Standard Institutes, together with observers from CEPA, four years to write EN 16636. Following a public consultation in December 2013 more than 300 comments were received, evaluated and responded to.
“On November 9, 2014 the voting process was initiated. It closed one month later on December 9 and returned a 100% approval. We can now safely predict that the standard will be available for official publication (initially only in English and German) by the Spring of 2015.” As reported in the last issue of Pest magazine, CEPA has developed a CEPA Certified logo and set-up a system to ensure that validation audits are done properly. Bureau Veritas has been appointed to help CEPA to organise the auditing process and a protocol has been drafted with the help of the Royal Society for Public Health. It defines how certification will work, how an audit should be done, what skills and experience auditors need, how often audits must be carried out, how non-conformities are raised and graded and how one must deal with them. |
|
|
|
Obtaining CEPA Certified status will allow the public to clearly identify businesses that work according to the principles of a professional standard with Europe-wide recognition. Bertrand concluded: “The publication of EN16636 represents a major step forward towards improving our industry’s image vis á vis the EU authorities and its citizens. All that remains to be done is for everyone in the industry to embrace the standard and close the circle. Our CEPA Certified Launch Conference in Brussels on 17 March 2015 will be the perfect opportunity to start this process.” |
||
