Actually, the
Joint IAF-ILAC-ISO Communique of January 2009 was issued to directly address this issue. Many accredited labs had customers requiring ISO 9001 in addition to ISO/IEC 17025, which was duplicating effort and driving up costs. The statement of the communique supersedes the statement in 17025.
Remember that ISO/IEC 17025 has two main parts: section 4, quality management system requirements; and section 5, technical requirements. What the Joint Communique is saying is that
a laboratory that is accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 meets the intent of ISO 9001 specifically because of the requirements in section 4.
Remember:
IAF (International Accreditation Forum) is the top-level organization for conformity assessment accreditation bodies. (This includes the organizations which in turn accredit QMS registrars.)
ILAC (International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation) is the top-level orgainzation for conformity assessment accreditation bodies that perfrom accreditations of calibration and testing laboratories.
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is a top-level standards publishing organization, especially for publishing standards on conformity assessment (of which quality management system auditing is a subset.)
Therefore, this Joint Communique was issued by the three top-level authorities in the process. I take that as pretty strong authority that it means exactly what it says.
Graeme