There are two separate issues here. The mandatory requirement under the gas regulations to be a member of a class of persons to carry out gas work, which is your responsibility. The requirement to notify LABC for the installation of fixed heat producing appliances, which is the customers responsibility. To make life easier for building control, they have put trust in the industry for those qualified people to allow them to self certificate their own work for building regulations compliance through a system of competent person schemes, which GSR run in parallel to the mandatory gas registration. So that when a customer goes into a contract with an installer to have a boiler installed the installer can get the relevant compliance notice issued without the customer having to go through the arduous expensive process of dealing directly with building control. I think the biggest issue here is why the customer has to achieve building regulation compliance for this type of work in the first place? Is it just another unnecessary system in a complicated over regulated world we live in, or does it serve a constructive valuable purpose? Personally I think it does serve one purpose only, in as much that it proves that the system has been installed by an approved installer, further than this I can not see any benefit. So why can't the benchmark log satisfy the requirement without having all this added expense for both customer and installer? After all its only another bit of paper that does not really mean that much.
