New Gas Safe Register

Last year, HSE announced changes to the gas engineer registration scheme in Great Britain. The scheme currently operated by CORGI will be replaced on 1 April 2009 by the new Gas Safe Register™ (operated by Capita). The Gas Safe Register will be the only gas engineer registration scheme approved by HSE from 1 April under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. All gas engineers wanting to undertake domestic and certain other gas work in Great Britain from 1 April will need, under those Regulations, to be registered with this scheme in order to be able lawfully to carry out any work on gas fittings, which includes gas appliances.

Gas Safe Register will maintain an up-to-date register of gas engineers who are qualified to install or repair gas fittings and appliances.It will have systems in place to check the competence of gas engineers, inspect their work and to deal with complaints about unsafe gas work. The operation of the Gas Safe Register will be overseen by HSE as the regulator with responsibility for gas safety. In the context of domestic gas safety this means that from 1 April, in order to ensure that gas engineers are lawfully able to carry out the gas work, domestic users of gas should ask for a Gas Safe Registered Engineer and not any other. The CORGI register will no longer count for those purposes.

The Gas Safe Register opened on Monday 19th January for currently registered gas engineers to register in advance with new scheme by telephone or through the website: http://www.gassaferegister.co.uk.