Monday 2 September 2013

"...and your speeches are all self-praise and--and--well, and gross exaggeration and-- and----" - "And gas," put in the Badger, in his common way.

One of my children is moving into a rented house on a bit of a deal. The landlord is a client of mine and the deal is she gets it rent free whilst she does it up. Anyway, she needs a new cooker. It has to be gas. Luckily an employee of mine’s husband is a plumber and he has a deal with a ‘CORGI’ registered blokey.

But CORGI seems to have disappeared and been replaced by the Gas Safe Register, run by (and I’ll give you one guess – yes you got it) - Capita.

This sent me to Wikipedia. The entry is a wonderful story of how the CORGI, the HSE and Capita seem to have colluded to destroy a working system each for their own profit.

There is also some wonderful nonsense about prohibiting competition to improve things, but the icing on the cake is this bit:-

“One of Capita's main challenges was to create a new 'Gas Safety' brand for the trade and public from April 2009. At that time, CORGI had over 93% public awareness across the UK. Despite having now been in place for over four years (2013), public awareness of the Gas Safe Register brand as the official registration agency for UK gas installers is still pitifully low, an issue which GSR seem to be doing little to address.”

There is a lesson in there somewhere, but quite what it is, I am not sure.

5 comments:

Bayard said...

Presumably there is nothing so simple that Crapita can't f*ck it up.

Capita - a shining example of how the private sector always does it better.

Tim Almond said...

B,

Ultimately, this is about the state and its insane level of compliance required, that leads to companies like Capita getting so much of the work.

Reading the history, it sounds like the old voluntary registration scheme worked just fine.

Bayard said...

Ah, but which came first, the companies like Crapita or the insane level of compliance? AFAIK, Crapita arose from the Thatcherite privatisations of the early '90s and the insane level of compliance is more recent.

Anonymous said...

Yep. Corgi worked. So they fixed it.

Weekend Yachtsman said...

The lesson for them is that if you have a good entry-preventing competition-inhibiting price-raising scam going on, you should leave well alone and keep on trousering the ill-gotten gains.

The lesson for us is that we should never allow such things to exist.