With the greatest of respect and in my opinion, you have to be living in some fantasy world if you think that suddenly thousands of people must have their right to trade restricted, or prohibited, and ultimately affect their ability to earn a living, pay bills & taxes over night, for no other reason than they failed to do an apprenticeship or gain a completely useless NVQ made up of photos of them standing next to a piece of conduit or holding a broom with a dust mask on. No chance, it isn’t going to happen, not right now and not in the future. There is no profit in that for the parasites, unless it was a tiered system with ultimately very expensive membership and more new add on “dumbed down” qualifications.
So one day you are deemed competent through Government backed schemes and the next day incompetent, unless you pay thousands of pounds for a new course and exam with multiple answer questions, no doubt focusing on how to read a book or use an index?
A “license to trade” is a long way off in this divided, over complicated, tangled up in red tape, parasite infested trade. A trade, which is at present and always has been, and always will be, policed with an insipid and ridiculously toothless non-entity, even if the work is dangerously unsafe.
Is it not the standard of education that should be targeted? The multi answer C&G land questions, which bear little resemblance to real situations? The Not very qualified 3, focusing on your ability to photograph yourself, whilst conducting an insulation resistance test? Or the wonderful test board with its real “life sized” circuits to test.
In my opinion, its the “dumbing down” of the qualifications that’s the problem. The forever changing numbers of C&G quals don’t help either. If you change the system to licensing, it just moves the goal posts, but the bad training and dumb down exams just change their names (& prices) and the incompetent scheme members become incompetent license holders, and the whole thing goes round and round making loads of money and the parasites thrive.
But, hey its not going to happen because we live in a dumb down society, where xfactor is more important than landing on mars, ****enders is more interesting than the Bush families relationship with the Bin Laden’s and reading has been replaced with the “must have it now” generation of “why read when you can watch the movie” people.
So why does it matter if it takes 3 years, 5 weeks or you just take the exam, if the qualification/exam was the same, requiring in-depth answers in each case? Change the education part and the rest will follow. There is no need for a License, just some good old fashioned real education, bring back C&G 2360 and C&G 2391, and C&G 2400 , with add on’s if required. Experience, well that’s a different kettle of worms.