This issue has been rumbling on over the last few weeks. The issue being less than reputable companies being allowed to be FENSA or Certass registered, causing damage to the reputation both of FENSA, the other industry bodies and the industry in general. Well I believe that there is pressure growing and that something needs to be done to address the frankly serious issues that do need to be rectified.

Remember this image I posted in a recent update on here? Well it turns out, via @MissEmma1’s investigative work that they have a Yellow Pages advert which says they are Certass registered.

That's right, it's Ā£100 cheaper than the previous advert!

That’s right, it’s Ā£100 cheaper than the previous advert!

@MissEmma1 did ask @Certass if they knew if these guys were registered to them. As it turns out they are not and they have been wrongly using the Certass logo. Certass have said that they will be getting in contact with the company in question and will be taking action. But, this could quite easily have been a company which was genuinely registered with Certass or any other industry body. There has been disbelief andĀ despair at these sorts of adverts and makes aĀ mockery of those companies who are genuinely trying to go about their business in an honest and decent way. The fact that cowboys can just easily become registered with a self-cert body as a good solid company is wrong.

So what can be done? Not quite sure, but one idea I had would be to create a two tier system. Sort of like a Grade A and Grade B FENSA/Certass registered company. A Grade A company would be classified as such if their company history was unbroken and untarnished for over a certain amount of years, their installers and other members of staff had qualifications in their line of work and so on. A Grade B company would be one without such information to their name.

This could achieve two things. Hopefully, for fear of not wanting to fall into the Grade B category, companies would make a genuine effort to improve all facets of their business, from installation, sales, customer etc, so that they could qualify for the Grade A category. Anything which forces scum out and the rest of the industry to improve would be a good thing.

The second thing would be that something like this would send a clear message to the discerning public as to who are the better of the double glazing companies out there. Again, this would force all those lesser companies to improve their business as they obviously wouldn’t want to be shamed with a Grade B listing and lose out on potential business to other Grade A companies around them.

As I said, this is just an idea. But I really do think that the self-cert bodies should be looking deeper into companies before allowing them to register and MTC’s and new installation qualifications should be a definite consideration. Whatever the case, something needs to be done as I can sense of a bit of a ground swell of frustration from all those good industry companies who feel their self-certĀ accreditationsĀ are being cheapened by the large amount of less than reputable businesses which also have the same badges.