All Railway Approvals Ltd (RAL) certification activities are undertaken with due regard to impartiality, independence and confidentiality. This ensures that all certification work undertaken gives the required confidence to the industry that results of certification will maintain the high standards of safety of the rail network. At the same time, RAL has gained considerable experience at assessing submissions in a diligent and effective way in challenging circumstances and remains dedicated to providing a positive certification service to customers.

Our internal certification processes are designed to ensure that the outcome of such work will be totally objective and not influenced by any factors such as vested interests, financial incentives or timescale pressures.

Specifically, RAL shall:

• Not participate in Conformity Assessment work unless appointed by a customer to do so.
  
  
• Not undertake any other form of work which would compromise its role as a Certification Body, i.e. it shall not undertake design, consultancy or any other services for work that it certificates.
  
  
• Not give advice to applicants as to the means of overcoming restrictions/barriers to certification
  
  
• Not use procedures or policies which impede or inhibit issue of certification for customers without undue reason

RAL uses engineers from a related company, Engineering Support Group Ltd (ESG), to carry out actual certification scrutiny and signatory work. ESG staff otherwise provide a railway engineering consultancy service to the railway industry on a day-to-day basis, which has the major advantage of ensuring that they are fully conversant with current railway engineering technology.

When working for RAL, there are close controls to ensure that our certification engineers have not otherwise made a material contribution towards the work put forward for scrutiny, particularly when working for ESG.

Our certification engineers will respect the confidentiality of all information gained during the certification work. Information gathered and the results of work undertaken will remain confidential to the customer who initiated the work, unless express permission is given to utilise that information elsewhere.

These requirements shall not preclude our engineers undertaking other activities for related bodies, provided that these activities are not related to any certification work for RAL.

The continued integrity of the independence/impartiality of RAL certification services is specifically reviewed on a 6-monthly basis by an independent Supervisory Board. It is RAL's policy that the views of all customers of its certification work should be represented at this forum and all customers are invited to attend should they so wish. Full details of forthcoming meetings are provided on this website.