Duane: The working party is a committee of measurers in the UK that prides itself doing work. It would be approximately an equivalent of your RRTC committee. Like you we have one meeting per year - all the rest is done by email.
There is a long term trend of increasing pressure in many areas of the UK to get races moved off the road. This often applies to the smaller races who cannot afford road closures, that the very large events can afford to put in place.
We are faced with the problem that many runners want their race performances on these non-road surfaces, recognised for ranking lists which have been getting increasingly popular even among the non-elite runners. Our National Body has asked at what we can do about providing a standard of measurement for them which will be better than relying on the claims of the race director working from GPS or from maps/google. At the moment we are feeling that we could measure them but we don't know what to say about accuracy. What we are fairly clear about is that they don't meet the surface standards for an IAAF road race, and according to the UK rules of competition for road races, these must be measured to IAAF standards. Hence the demand for a new measurement class in the UK.