On 13 December, José Manuel Prieto chaired ENAC's Ordinary General Assembly meeting. During the meeting, in which both the 2024 budget and activity plans that ENAC will undertake over the next year were presented. In their speeches the President and the General Manager, Beatriz Rivera, addressed different topics of interest for ENAC's future and for the conformity assessment sector as a whole.

ENAC's president highlighted "accreditation's crucial role in promoting a quality infrastructure that contributes to increasing the different Spanish economic and industrial activity sectors competitiveness, as well as improving how the EU Internal Market works effectively, and the access to third country markets". In this regard, he highlights the importance of the new agreement signed with the Spanish Association for Standardization (Asociación Española para la Normalización, UNE) and the Spanish Metrology Centre (Centro Español de Metrología, CEM) to promote actions in this framework.

Beatriz Rivera stressed that ENAC's 2024 activity will be greatly influenced by regulation, especially European regulation. In addition to the more than 110 already approved European legislative provisions requiring accredited conformity assessment, new regulations will be added in 2024. Those related to sustainability aspects, mostly including verification or validation activities, are based on the ISO/IEC 17029 standard. In this regard, she highlighted how important the sustainability information inspection scheme was that ENAC has recently presented, and which "ultimately in the foreseeable future, aims to have accredited inspectors to make these law in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)”.

In the same vein, she also highlighted relevant and impactful legislative developments, such as the already approved Regulation 2023/956 establishing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism or the Artificial Intelligence Regulation, which is expected to be approved in the first quarter of 2024, which has accredited inspection/validation as one of its basic pillars.

Another line of work priority highlighted by the General Manager in her speech was accreditation in the healthcare field, a field with an expected sharp increase in activity aligned with what already happening in 2023. In this regard, she pointed out that "given the number, variety and excellence of accredited laboratories and the sector's growing knowledge of accreditation and its prestige, which has produced a phenomenon of feedback and a significant increase in applications”. In addition to this, for next year the "Image Diagnosis" accreditation scheme will begin to be developed to respond to the interest shown in having this accreditation, both publicly and privately.

Finally, other sectors to highlight, both for their newness and for the impact they will have in 2024, are cybersecurity, with developed European schemes incorporating accredited assessment such as the new certification scheme based on Common Criteria (EUCC) within the framework of the Cybersecurity Act, and Artificial Intelligence, an activity in which ENAC has already been collaborating with the European Commission in different working groups.

“In 2024, ENAC will continue to work to strengthen the Spanish accreditation system and increasingly collaborate with the best professionals in audit processes and their stakeholders, with whom we work closely with to provide the accreditation process with the rigor it requires and incorporate the required technical and professional knowledge," she concludes.