BES, neither Part Pee or the scams are fit for purpose! That is the whole point! The scams are profit making private companies, therefore their interest is never going to be public safety, only their balance sheet. As long as the scams exist, the decline of skills within the trade will continue. Part P needs to go or be severely re-written.
What we need is a licence to practice as an electrician in this country. The licence will be restricted only to those who posses a core qualification and proof of experience as a bare minimum. No more grandfather rights, no more 5WWs, no more kitchen fitters doing rewires! This licence needs to be backed by statute, which isn't hard contrary to popular belief, and there needs to be an enforcement process with teeth that exists to not only impose harsh penalties on those practicing as an electrician without a licence, but also to rip up the licence of any electrician who carries out poor work!
You mean like ACS? That's the gas thing that I have and it works like this;
I wanted to work on gas. I already was competent working with pipes with water running through them so I already had a degree of competency so the next step was to do some training and assessment.
The first part is to learn about Gas Safety and this is all the do's and donts to prevent things going bang and testing (think MFT here but for gas) Flueing and ventilation is a big part of it because more people are killed by wrongly flued appliances and lack of adequate ventilation than there are of explosions.
Ok the next bit is the assessment and that's in 2 parts - written & practical. The written part consists of answering a lot of questions about the regs etc and the pass mark is 100%. any less and you fail.
Next is the practical bit and you're let loose on test rigs and thing where you have to diagnose faults and dangerous situations.
Pass both parts and you get your certificate with CCN-1 printed on it which means you're competent at sizing pipework (think cable sizing here) and and installing and testing said pipework etc. So in leccy terms you can first fix.
Now comes the Bolt-On bits.
Ok. you want to fit central heating boilers? Take the course and assessment for that and get the certificate.
Then there's Gas Fires, and Gas Cookers and Gas Tumble Dryers and a couple more besides.
Each of these courses & assessments called Modules are to be paid for separately and you can have as many or as few as you like, BUT CCN-1 is mandatory there is no escape from that.
Costs for this lot??
Well I have CCN-1, Gas Cookers, Central Heating Boilers <70kW and that lot cost me just under ÂŁ1k BUT it lasts for 5 years so spread out it's not too bad. (mine expires next month. I shall not be renewing it)
The wasp in the jam is Gas Safe which is like the leccy scams - you pay them every year just for them to look at your certificates and write you name in a book.
When I first started, it was CORGI and I paid my first years subscription and that was all they got out of me then Gas Safe took over and I never paid a penny to them.
As far as I was concerned I had certificates and a nice plastic card with writing on to prove my competence and that for me was enough!
I hope this ramble has been of some use to somebody.
