Energy Assessor Qualifications. Have your say on the proposals

As Board Members of Asset Skills, home inspectors.co.uk has been a participant in the official Government supported Working Group to create the new qualification for Domestic Energy Assessors (DEA). This exercise is ongoing but has now reached industry consultation stage and Asset Skills are seeking comments from practitioners and stakeholders.

Home Inspectors.co.uk will be putting forward an official response to this consultation exercise, but you may want to have your own say about what the Government is proposing, and so to make this easy we have reproduced a copy of the Asset Skills letter which explains a little more about the process.

Here is a copy of the letter we have received from Asset Skills:

'In order to meet the requirements of the Housing Act 2006 and the European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD), it is necessary to develop a cadre of suitably trained and qualified Domestic Energy Assessors (DEAs).

DEAs will assess the energy performance of dwellings when they are to be sold let and will produce Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) - for inclusion within Home Information Packs (HIPs) in the case of marketed sales.

In order to underpin the training and development of DEAs and to inform the development of a suitable qualification, a suite of National Occupational Standards (NOS) has been developed. These draft NOS have been closely informed by the current NOS for Home Inspectors, although a degree of tailoring has been required to ensure that they adequately reflect the particular demands of domestic energy assessment.

How to respond to the consultation

Asset Skills would like your views on both the draft Functional Map (described at the front of the document) and the draft NOS for DEAs.

Find these documents for comment - http://www.energy-inspectors.co.uk

Then, please send your comments to our Associate Consultant, Liz Kingdom, preferably by e-mail. Liz's contact details are given below.

We are happy to receive your feedback in whatever format is most convenient. For example, you may wish to summarise your comments within an email or letter, or you may wish to include suggestions within the Functional Map or NOS themselves (e.g. using the 'track changes' facility in Word).

If you do not have sufficient time to review and comment on the full map or suite of five units, please focus your feedback on the more 'technical' units (3 to 5 inclusive) of the draft Standards

You will notice that there are some specific queries in red text through the NOS document; these are issues on which we would particularly welcome your thoughts.

Whatever form your feedback takes, please consider the following questions:

1. In general, do the NOS adequately describe the competence (skills and knowledge) required of DEAs?
2. Do the draft NOS contain any areas of competence (skills and/or knowledge) that are not relevant to DEAs?
3. Are there any significant areas of competence (skills and/or knowledge) missing?

Please make sure that you include your name, job title, and organisation and contact details in your response.

Due to tight project timescales, please ensure that your feedback reaches Asset Skills by 5.30 pm on Friday 20th October 2006 at the latest.

Your comments should be sent to:

Liz Kingdom
Associate Consultant
c/o Asset Skills, 2 The Courtyard, 48 New North Road, Exeter, EX4 4EP
Telephone: 01392 851 242Fax: 01392 423 373
Email: liz.kingdom@talk21.com

Thank you for your help with this important work

Richard Foxwell
Project Manager
Asset Skills
Telephone: 07711 095 215
Email: rfoxwell@assetskills.org

You can also find a number of useful downloads at energy-inspectors.'