On 23 September 2011 EHFA signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Government of Catalunya, under which the Catalan side would join the EREPS programme.
Registering instructors one at a time from Brussels was never the plan. EREPS grew through the bodies that already kept the records: national registers, professional associations and, where the relevant powers sit below the national government, regional bodies. Spain is a case in point. Responsibility for sport and for vocational training lies largely with the autonomous communities, and the register the association had been working with since June was the Catalan one; an agreement that reached it and its members had to be made with the regional government. The memorandum followed the alliance agreed with the Catalan sports professionals register earlier in the year.
What the register gives an individual professional is the same in Catalunya as anywhere else: a record held at European level that an employer or a member of the public can check, and that means the same thing outside the region where the qualification was earned. For the association, each agreement of this kind widened the base the register had to stand on: a European register is only as useful as the number of countries whose professionals it actually holds, and these agreements were how that number grew. See EREPS and national associations.