You can't beat five years carrying a blokes tools followed by seeing every situation you could ever come across, granted.

Neither is registration a safety net, although having an idea of how to work within the IEE Regs is a prerequisite. Based on that, validation is about the best a consumer can expect in practical terms.

However, this does not address a time served expert with years and years under his belt suddenly having to go back to school to be taught by people with no experience, and to be sat next to some kid who has been to a few classes and then is given a piece of paper that says in law he is at your level. That galls, but be buggered if I know what the answer is. Interestingly, as part of what I do these days, it includes a warrant that allows me access to health and social care environments. (I don't use it, but it is there..) I had four days of role play and instruction on using PACE etc, followed by writing up what we did. They called this few sheets of paper a portfolio. I handed that in and in return was given a BTEC Level 5 qualification. When I checked, level 5 means it is seen by the academic world as the same as a foundation degree, or the HND that took me three years of night school to get! Qualifications alone seem increasingly to be a measure of national education levels rather than actual attainment of an individual.....

My wife has to keep abreast of the ever changing world of surgery, so most evenings whilst I am brushing the dog, in the pub, whatever, she is reading up papers, ensuring she has read all the journals and recently the government decided they have to have annual assessment of their competence. The surprise for many is that the legal need for it is fairly new. Hitherto, many doctors only kept up to date out of professional obligation. As many inquests and fitness to practice hearings have found, this wasn't always the case.

So you start to understand how and why governments, insurance companies and ultimately consumers wish there to be some form of kite mark? (Not that my recent certificate makes me the next Morse!)