Pro's & Con's

[Millsy 82]

what gas safe needs is some powers to investigate without being called inView attachment 18452they could start with this beauty
View attachment 18452

That's nothing but pure laziness. How long does it take to cut a flue pipe? 1 minute!

 

[Ermintrude]

It's done to protect hanging baskets

 

[oz-plumber]

QUOTE=Ray Stafford;650032]Hi Oz

I'm confused. What did I say that was derogatory?

I have spent almost my entire working life supplying materials to plumbers, and the one thing I can tell you for absolute certain is that there no such thing as an average "plumber". There are a full range of human beings, skilled and less skilled, polite and rude, reliable and haphazard, honest and dishonest, good looking and ugly, who happen to make their living working with pipes, valves, fluids and gases.

You will find me on this board and elsewhere regularly extolling the virtues of hiring a skilled professional.

But the fact that I believe that it is normally better to hire a professional skilled person is a very long way from believing that it should be against the law to make a different choice. Living in a free country is about making choices - including the right to make choices that you or I might disagree with.

Its appropriate for the state to intervene in those choices ONLY when the dangers are potentially catastrophic, which is why we regulate things like pharmaceuticals, firearms and explosives, and regulate trades and professions like medecine and gas fitting. But it is nonsense to compare the negative consequences of unlicenced plumbing with those of unlicenced medical practice.

Its not freedom if people are only free to do what you want.

And if you think that you ought to have the right to introduce regulations against the public will, and that the ordinary man in the street can kiss your bum, then I wish you well, but I prefer to live in a democracy where the laws have the support of the public.

And remember, in plumbing, we are the professionals, and everyone else is "joe public". But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so when every other trade and profession seeks to regulate and protect their industry, I presume you will be content to pucker up - because you are Joe Public to them.[/QUOTE]


Hi Ray,

Lets shake hand and agree to disagree.

I respect your views and opinions - not only on this thread but all threads.

We may have both misconstrued what each other was saying, but then we are on the same team playing at opposite ends of the field.

No hard feelings,

Oz Plumber

 

[lame plumber]

I hear this a lot, but it isn't true. It would be very far from easy.

All gas appliances have been bought and sold at least once before an engineer gets his hands on it. In many cases they have been sold three times or more. So you have to register AND regulate every merchant, showroom, distributor etc. I estimate that there are, on average, probably 1.5 to 2 sales in the supply chain for every 1 sale of the sort that you think would be "easy" to regulate.

Secondly, its not B&Q that are selling gas appliances in volume to unregistered people. Truly retail sales of gas appliances are trivially small. Its plumb centre, grahams, and indeed us who are selling to unregistered purchasers. Millions of appliances are bought every year by perfectly legitimate buyers - hospitals, housing associations, councils, governement departments, schools, hotel chains, big builders etc, who wouldn't dream of fitting it illegally, but don't want to be forced to pay the installers mark up - and why should they? I can see why registered engineers would like to monopolise those sales, but it would just be rent-seeking of the worst possible kind.

Setting up a point-of-sale regulatory system would be neither cheap nor easy. And it wouldn't stop some registered but irresponsible fitter from selling them out of the back of his van for a tenner mark up.

By far the cheapest and easiest thing would be to properly prosecute the next 50 or so "hall of shame" cases, and dole out a bit of high-profile jail time

its simple ray no card no sale, screwfix manage it ok, mark ups are negotiable like everything and thats no excuse in my simple mind.

 

[helpsy]

It would require a picture on it as you could hand yours to a mate to us otherwise

 

[Ermintrude]

It would require a picture on it as you could hand yours to a mate to us otherwise

Gas safe card does

 

[kirkgas]

Won't ever happen, it's flogging a dead horse to ask for restriction on sale of goods to trade only, if we get that for our trade we must then give it up for every other trade that involves any material that we could fit and injure someone, like electrics and car parts to name just two, and also there are a lot of fitters who stay under VAT threshold (and also greatly reduce their liability of getting stung out of £1000's) by getting customer to purchase the material, how would they trade? And as already said the companies selling have more power than us, and the government will look at how few deaths there are per year and say it isn't worth it, harsh but true, there aren't enough people dying from gas related work to make it a big hitter

 

[deandive]

cant see it working, and hope it doesnt happen, otherwise il have to stop doing water plumbing, I havent got the qualifications to buy a tap washer ;-)

 

[Ray Stafford]

its simple ray no card no sale, screwfix manage it ok, mark ups are negotiable like everything and thats no excuse in my simple mind.

So I couldn't buy a boiler then Jon? And for that matter, neither can screwfix! Neither of us are GSR, yet we buy many times more boilers than any of you GSR fellas.

What Screwfix do as a matter of company policy is very different to what you can have as a law.

 

[lame plumber]

wouldnt be hard to include merchants in a scheme as your not fitting just selling on, common sense often works better than restrictive laws, after all your trade only ray and that involves restrictive sales routines