The Heating Engineers and Allied Trades Federation says that heating engineers are calling for more frequent training and assessment to enable them to keep abreast of the latest regulations and codes of practice every year rather than every five years, as is the current practice.
Usually heating engineers are required to renew their certificates of competence every five years in order to maintain their Registration with Gas Safe and/or Competent Persons schemes.

However, they now argue that being out of the classroom for five years at a time is too long. They say that it is creating an 'all or nothing' approach to keeping up to date with all of the Regulatory, British Standard and Industry codes of practice against which they can be judged.

The quality of training as with the quality of all things can be found to vary. Often an engineer attending a good training centre will come out having learnt what has changed during the previous five years and then realising that work he has undertaken has been unintentionally non-compliant or even illegal during that period.

Engineers want to stay on the right side of the law and be updated properly when something changes that affects their job of work. Many now say they would sooner pay to attend training centres annually instead of every five years to enable them to keep fully abreast of changes and up to date with working practices which are relevant to their job of work.

In response to engineers' concerns, the Heating Engineers and Allied Trades Federation has launched an online petition on its website. Heating Engineers who wish to see a change to the current system can show their support by simply signing up to the petition via the Federation website http://www.heatfed.co.uk/Assessment- Petition.html

The petition is open for 90 days and to all heating engineers whether or not they belong to the Federation or any other body or organisation. It aims to achieve the support of at least 500 individual engineers to enable the petition to show statistically sufficient credibility for the proposals to be taken forward.