Did anyone else notice a degree of panic just before July 1st came round? Probably due to a lack of good communication.

@NigelGrantUpvc has been making the point recently that if he had not been on Twitter, he would not have known about CE Marking and all the other changes that have been made on the first of this month. Luckily, he was, and now knows what to do. But the main point being raised is that not everyone is online but a lot of the information to do with the changes was being published online.

There will be those out there that would have been happily getting on with their day jobs, blissfully unaware of the impending changes. To be honest, there hasn’t been that much literature put out into the industry about the changes, so the smaller guys who may not have a showroom or won’t be part of any major alliance or organisation will have known nothing about it. In fact, there are probably some out there who are STILL unaware that changes have been made.

The problem is, you cannot expect those that are not internet or tech savvy to go online on the off chance that they come across information about various changes to laws and regs. It is up to the industry’s biggest bodies to make sure that every business, not matter big or small, gets to know exactly what to do. You can’t expect businesses to go find out about the changes if they don’t know anything about it in the first place.

The “not our problem” attitude could land quite a few businesses with hefty fines. What I think these changes do is demonstrate the poor communications structure that exists within our industry. Whenever there are changes or great upheaval, there always seems to be this broken, sporadic attempt at trying to tell everyone. Then information gets confused and there’s a ton of mixed messages. I can’t fathom why in and industry of around 16,000 companies, a very advanced internet network and far too many industry bodies than is necessary, we can’t efficiently, effectively, contact all companies of all types.

One thing I think bodies like FENSA, Certass and the GGF could work on is trying to create a clear communications network which manages to reach all companies, whether they are registered with themselves or not. If they can manage to do that, it might help solve a lot more problems and answer a lot more questions in the future.