This bill seeks to facilitate the development of a culture of quality through providing a sound and effective National Quality Infrastructure that allows the development and compliance with increasing quality requirements and that can support the national authorities in their mandates for consumer protection, free trade, environmental protection and other societal objectives from a technical point of view.

With the imminent development of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2016, the capacity of the country to develop more competitive products, services and systems and to support industries to show compliance with both internal and external market requirements is a top priority to take full advantage of trade flows in terms of socioeconomic growth.

While the country is making great progress in many competitiveness and ease of doing business indicators, there is still substantial room for improvement, particularly when it comes to facilitating the access of Philippine MSMEs to foreign markets (the 12th edition of the Doing Business Reports shows the need for improvement in the trading across borders dimension).

A critical aspect of technical development and market access is the capacity of the country to implement and show compliance with mandatory and voluntary technical requirements. Technical compliance is supported by a number of interlinked activities, many of them of voluntary nature, which are usually collectively referred to as the National Quality Infrastructure. This includes standardization, accreditation, and metrology.

The need for a coordinated quality infrastructure has been already identified in the Philippines Development Plan 2011-2016: The government shall set up a National Quality Infrastructure to integrate and coordinate a series of activities involving metrology, standardization, testing, and accreditation and certification.

The reason for the existence of the National quality Infrastructure is to have the necessary institutions and practices that allow the different stakeholders to develop and show compliance with technical requirements and strive for increasingly higher levels of quality beyond the mandatory accepted level set out in technical regulations. Therefore it is not only a resource for more competitive products and services, but it is also used by government to support the definition of and compliance with safety, health, fair trade and consumer/environment protection and is used by Government in its dual roles of public purchaser and as overseer of service providers in both the public and private areas.

While the country has already a number of Republic Acts addressing the need for institutions and practices dealing with Consumer Protection, including the usage if National Quality Infrastructure that also address the need to support the Philippine economy in developing products, services and systems of quality levels beyond the mandatory requirements set out in technical regulations. 

Based on all existing institutions mandated to develop National Quality Infrastructure related activities, and on the need to increase coordination amongst them, the need for greater ownership by the private sector in contributing to the governance and strategy of those activities, and the need to promote increasing levels of quality for products, services and systems, there is an urgent need to create a national vision of the quality infrastructure for the country. 

In view of the foregoing, the approval of this measure is earnestly sought.