choose Capita as their new partner for gas installer registration scheme.
A new gas installer registration scheme is on the way from April 2009 after the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) announced their preference for Capita over current holder Corgi. The new scheme will be governed much more tightly by the HSE than the previous one and Capita are promising to focus on high levels of gas safety awareness amongst consumers aligned to a powerful new gas safety brand as well as "a rapid and dramatic improvement in levels of service satisfaction" as well as a commitment to working with other industry bodies
?Our focus now is to work with the HSE and Capita to maintain the profile of gas safety for installers and consumers, and to also provide guidance and support to the 300 or so current CORGI employees?.
From Capita web site:
"Around 250 CORGI employees are expected to TUPE transfer to the new scheme."
As a mere observer of these things I have rather begun to get the impression that CORGI has increasingly come to believe that installers exist to further it rather than the other way round.
This would be why it has been chosen. The incompetent always hire beneath their ability in order to look good. Since the hiring organisation consists of civil servants, it has the double benefit of allowing blame to be apportioned elsewhere when it all goes wrong.
> HSE choose Capita as their new partner for gas installer registration
But imagine the benefits ... whenever you get your boiler serviced the fitter will be able to do a clandestine check for unlicensed tellies and children truanting off school.
HSE choose Capita as their new partner for gas installer registration
The HSE's own website carries a fair amount about it here:
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CORGI have a brief press release on it here
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HSE stuff is pretty much PHB-speak. It includes """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" KPI 2 - Brand recognition
This KPI sets out targets for establishing the new gas safety brand with gas consumers during the first two and half years of the new scheme.
This KPI is intended to:
Deliver early strong establishment and recognition of the new brand with gas consumers and minimum levels of unprompted brand awareness for the Autumn 2009.
Deliver high level of association between the new brand amongst gas consumers and the messages on gas safety including the need to use registered gas installers for gas work.
Minimise public confusion between the new gas safety brand and other brands.
That's going to be interesting. Inasmuch as Joe public has a clue about gas safety the word he's most likely to know is 'CORGI'. Since Crapita are not being given CORGI's name along with their core business and their TUPEd over employees they're going to have to splash out on some seriously high level advertising to get their name across. (Or I suppose a Potters Bar-magnitude disaster might do, as it did for Jarvis :-)) Where will the money for this advertising come from: their shareholders' profits or gas installers' registration fees? Answers on the back of a postcard please.
And if installers' fees go up, where does that money end up coming from?
I know it's been quite the thing to knock CORGI, and I daresay some people have had good reason to. Personally I've not had any problems with them in the 5 years I've been registered. The 3 inspectors I've dealt with have been fair and helpful, their admin (registration and notifications, including their online services) works OK, and the information they provide in their magazine for installers (imaginatively titled Gas Installer) is useful, if somewhat pedantic.
AIUI one of the reasons the HSE gave for not wanting to let someone else like NAPIT run a registration scheme in competition with CORGI was that it would confuse the public who (it was implied) are familiar with the CORGI name. The same objection is true of the present change but it's still going to be a monopoly and whe^H^H^Hif Crapita screw it up there's nowhere better for installers or consumers to go.
And anyone who uses words like "deliver a suite of changes to refocus and improve ...", "stakeholder" and gas safety "brand" has got to be dodgy ;-)
Something *should* change! But won't - we will watch over the next few years as docuement after document, web site after web site doesn't get updated to say Capita rather than CORGI (or a suitable generic term).
You will see people swearing blind that CORGIs are allowed to do gas work (for gain) and no-one else is.
I'm sorry: what is the CORGI 'con'? AIUI the word 'con' is usually short for 'confidence trick'. CORGI run a registration scheme for gas installers including inspecting installers and running a public complaints system. They've also (especially lately, maybe aware that their meal ticket was under threat) been (or claimed to be) chasing unregistered installers, and publicising gas safety with Joe Public and parliament.
The only aspect of 'con' I can think of is claiming credit for reducing CO poisoning incidents which are probably more due to general replacement of conventional flue appliances by room-sealed ones and reduction in the number of gas fires being used.
Spamming installers' customers with a vapid glossy PR magazine probably hasn't done them any good with either group but still doesn't put them in anywhere near the same league of bottom-feeders as Crapita.
Well consumers are tricked into having confidence in installations that are done by CORGI registered installers, when they may or may not be any good, just like before CORGI. Sounds like a confidence trick to me and a very literal one!
The con is that there is no competition and CORGI exists to foster restrictive practices but promotes itself on the basis of safety and regulation.
As with the NICEIC con, the body in question makes specious claims about safety, but uses sleight of hand to avoid addressing the issue that caused the body to be appointed.
I'm thinking here of NICEIC and the farce of inspecting fixed domestic wiring when the incident that caused politicians to legislate was an accident involving a faulty flex. And CORGI attempting to prevent amateurs working on gas installations, most laughably when they attempt to prevent people working on their own boat or caravan, when the incidents that affected, and continue to affect, public perception were the fault of "professional" installers.
So, as with the BMA, the same sort of restrictive practices that stop you or me setting up as a doctor, i.e. you have to do training which is supposed to prove you are competetent before being allowed to register and practice.
AIUI the "incident that caused politicians to legislate" (we're talking here of Part P, right?) was caused by fixed wiring being installed outside the permitted zones in a kitchen, causing the daughter (in-law?) of a politician to be killed by electrocution (hubby had put up a metal rack for hanging kitchen spoons & things, a fixing screw of which had gone into the cable making the metal live: Mrs reached for a spoon while touching an earthed appliance and was killed).
And NICEIC was in existence for years before this incident and Part P. And I don't think "it was appointed". Unlike CORGI which has (sorry, had) an HSE franchise to run *the* gas installer registration scheme NICEIC is one of many bodies (including CORGI) which run Electrical accreditation schemes.
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