But based on the news and HSE reports there are near misses and the occasional death more often than I think they'd like to admit. Funny how we never hear the follow up to it. Makes you wonder if it's just brushed under the carpet almost as if the don't want to or can't deal with it
I'm going to take the unpopular position here.
Regardless of what individual experiences may be, or what anecdotal evidence may be quoted, the overall statistics suggest that CORGI did a good job, and that GASSAFE continue to improve the situation.
Lets start from the basics. The job of Gas Safe is to make (pardon the obvious) GAS SAFE.
That is to say, its job is to protect the public from harm caused by gas.
We have quite a good system of autopsy and inquest in the UK, and when someone dies of CO poisoning or as a consquence of an explosion the cause is usually identified and recorded.
Here is a graph showing deaths from CO poisoning by all fuel types, by Mains Gas, and by gas explosion.
We also record "near misses" - hospitalisations, losses of consciousness etc due to CO poisoning. These figures are not quite so accurate because of improvements in diagnosis and reporting standards, and so probably understates the improvement.
If I were GasSafe, I would argue firmly on my track record. If you want them to make a change to their current way of working, you have to demonstrate that your proposed new policy will be more effective in preventing deaths and near-misses than the current approach.
Don't forget the law of unintended consequences. Restricting sales to GSR (which is an impractical idea for reasons I have bored the forum with before) only prevents the idiot landlord from buying a brand new kosher appliance from a reputable dealer. It does not prevent him from purchasing an old wreck from ebay or down the pub, or indeed from connecting up the gas cooker with garden hose, because no-one will sell him a proper cooker hose. It is entirely possible that a well meaning restriction on the sale of parts will result in MORE death and injury than the current situation.
Having talked at length to a leading campaigner on CO deaths, I am told that there is little correlation between the (thankfully quite small) number of deaths, and the registration status of the installer. In many cases the killer appliances have been neglected and untouched by any engineer for many years. In other cases, sadly, even registered GSRs do stupid things sometimes. So whilst it might be intuitive to think that 100% GSR registration compliance would lead to zero deaths, unfortunately, this is unlikely to prove to be the case.
Yesterday, I was with a well known boiler manufacturer and talking about this issue. He was telling me that in the future, he expected that setting up new appliances may require an app on the engineers phone, which would link to the appliance, either by bluetooth or hard-wire, or wi-fi. In any event, restricting the app (for instance to work only if registered to a current GSR) would prevent installation and commissioning by unregistered engineers. This would seem an excellent way forward - better even than my smart card idea mentioned in earlier posts.
But sadly, some people will still die.
