Hi James

I attended a meeting of our local trading standards approved workshop scheme that we are members of and one of the consultants to the scheme has been looking at the Motor Codes scheme and has been invited by the OFT to provide an independent view on it.

He gave the meeting a brief summary of his thoughts on the scheme. Needless to say he wasn't very complimentary of the scheme. He has analysed their recent report on the scheme very carefully.

Obviously his main concern was that any garage could sign up without any form of compliance check, training, etc. Apparently only 149 garages have been complianced checked and given the current membership and the rate of the checks, its going to take 8 years to visit them all! And they reckon they will only visit every couple of years.

I didn't quite get the details on this part but there was also some discussion on the negative scoring of some of the compliance checks and feedback responses and the report suggested that due to the small sample size this was an incorrect statistic and until the sample size is increased these negative results will not be shown on the website.....

A couple of the other scheme members who are from franchised dealers confirmed that they had been almost forced to join by the manufacturer and that when they were complianced checked the inspectors weren't interested in the real side of the business, i.e. training, quality checks, etc. In fact it was no where near as stringent as the compliance checks that we are subject to join the trading standards scheme.

My personal oppinion is that our customers have far more reassurance in us having a Tradings Standards Approved sign above the door than some national scheme they have never heard off. Also the arbitration is much cheaper.....its free for both sides, ublike Motor Codes!

Having said that, for £75 we can get our company registered on the website so its cheap advertising and if they do go all the way, we will probably have to join anyway.

I'm happy for the goverment to legislate and make licensing compulsory.....that is the only way to close the rogue outfits down. If you're comitted to doing the job properly, you have nothing to lose.

Regards

Sean