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So I get home after a long day out and pop into my home office so I can register the cooker I installed earlier today. Pretty normal stuff under the CORGI regime. I tried to input a gas job last week and there was no way to do it. When I called the newly formed Gas Safe Register (GSR) help desk I was told that they didn’t have the software finished yet! They’ve only been preparing for six months. So today I log on and hope that the software is running and I’m in luck. It is. I enter my clients postcode, confirm the address, confirm some other information and then try to enter the job I undertook which was a free standing cooker install. WRONG!
The guidance information tells me that it will only allow me to enter work that I’m qualified for. Well, I’m qualified to install cookers but there is no option available. I waste some more time trying to get around it but in the end I can’t find a solution. So I dial the 0800 number and after about fifteen minutes on hold I speak to a call centre attendant. I relate the above story and am informed rather melodically that ‘cookers’ cannot be entered through the GSR system like they used to under the old CORGI system. WHAT?! I ask. He says that I can register the cooker with; and I quote; ‘someone else’ but not with GSR. Who is ‘someone else?’ After ten more minutes of banter and trying to figure out where to register gas cooker installations he finally tells me that he can do it over the phone this time but I will ‘NEVER’ be able to do it online.
When I get off the phone with GSR I call my local building authority to ask their advice as to how much it will cost to register my cooker installations with the council. After relating the above story they too are surprised. While we spoke on the phone they were reading through their copy of the GSR pamphlet. They were under the impression that everything should be working like it did with CORGI. But apparently it isn’t.
So here I sit. broken hearted…and still have no answer. And now I have to take out more time out of my already busy day tomorrow to find out where I am supposed to register work that GSR doesn’t want to know about. ‘LEGALLY I need to register these jobs. I’ll bet the cowboys are tooling up for some extra work.
As I said many months ago we’re going from the frying pan into the fire.
More to follow when I clarify this situation.