The organisation’s managing director, Newell McGuiness, said there were concerns that the industry had become disengaged from the process and that lack of government support meant that the schemes now risk failure.
Speaking in the wake of the new Approved Certifier scheme, Mr McGuiness said it had been a flaw in the legislation not to make certification the industry standard. He said this was reflected in the falling certificate numbers since the introduction of the Building Scotland Act of 2003.
Mr McGuiness said certification of construction is a robust and reliable method for signing off electrical work and that, although the 2003 Act reinstituted competency into the sign-off process it allowed certification to become optional.
He said, ‘In correcting one flaw we inadvertently introduced another, and what we are now seeing with the fall-off in Certificate numbers and the disengagement from the Certification process is really exactly the same effect we saw with previous schemes. History is, I’m afraid, repeating itself and it is because we have not learned to make sure the legislation is watertight, or robust enough.’
