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There is guidance for maintaining your knowledge via CPD by various 'bodies' and some training providers provide refresher courses for required tickets
I'll tag our main Sponsors - ProGreen - tomorrow (Richard, in particular) as being BASIS qualified, he has good visibility for these best practices.
With regard to machinery, for residential projects there no formal need for tickets, except that your liability insurance will require you to be 'competent' in event of a claim/accident.
The issue then becomes what does 'competent' mean and then they look to see if you have received relevant training via an accredited trainer.
On commercial / civics sites tickets are required for everything (well almost !)
I think that in almost every situation, 'Grandfather' rights have now expired ....
Hi Helen,
The stance on qualifications is indeed quite muddied. Refresher training for Chainsawm, First Aid etc is suggested or mandated by the awarding bodies (LANTRA, City&Guilds, etc. ....legally required tickets such as Pesticides do not have an offical expiry however, by law, you must keep up to date with legislation...this is the tricky bit as there is no definition of what is 'up to date' and most will choose to be safe tha sorry by carrying out regualar refreshers. Commonly refresher training is offered (by us and other training establishments) which ticks the box and it could be argued that businesses who order pesticides from a BASIS qualified advisor would mean you are upto date and informed of any changes. Any updates from a supplier or literature you read should be made a note of to evidence effort to keep up to date.
Sadly I don't think any of this is ever questioned until it goes to court or prosecution following an accident or injury....
Most of my work is commercial. At least mostly not domestic [I suppose you would include PCC’s/churchyards as commercial].
I work and have worked for local councils and other companies and bodies. In thirty years I have never been asked for any ‘tickets’ or questioned about my experience or qualifications. I worked for one council for eleven years and they never even asked to see my public liability insurance. A council I still work for asked to see my insurance whilst tendering three years ago, but have not asked to see the insurance renewal since. They have never asked about tickets.
I was only talking about this a few days ago to a friend who is a bespoke soft furnishings maker. She works with an interior designer is often required to go to work sites and refurbishment type building sites. So she paid to do the qualification that you need to go onto and work on these sites. She said that not only was she never asked about her ‘ticket’, but if she asked the foreman or site manager if they wanted to see it, they just said there was no need and they weren’t interested. The ‘ticket’ never saw the light of day. She said it was a complete waste of her time and money. At the end of the day she was only there measuring up for curtains.
You don’t need tickets for grass cutting or hedge cutting even on commercial sites. I know many of the lads on the District Council parks dept. and none of them have tickets for mowing. The day I need a ticket to mow grass is the day I stop doing it [actually I would just continue]. Some seem a bit obsessed with all this. I’m sure someone will be along soon to jump up and down about the legal requirements and repercussions.
I have been using chainsaws for 35 years without incidence. To be fair, I probably only use it three or four times a year for light pruning [usually on domestic sites]. Last year I did cut down a few small trees in an old churchyard, ably assisted by my very good friend who is the church warden. We only talked about theatre tickets. Does that count?
It does get ridiculous. A while back the drain was blocked next to my relative’s house. It is in a very quiet cul de sac. The drain guys turned up and barricaded around the drain cover like it was an unexploded bomb, with a very large cordoned off area. They kept taking time coded photographs which uploaded to head office. The guy actually rodding the drain was so covered in protective clothing that he looked like an astronaut. It took the two of them so long that any local guy would have had the job done, perfectly safely, in a fraction of the time. It was just a blocked drain for goodness sake. No doubt they were both ticketed up to their eyes.
suggest above is the exception 🤷♂️ we get asked every year for our insurance details by commercial customers & details of heath & safety policies & training, esp for spraying - seems some clients are lax ?
industry deffo needs to up there game. no doubt someone will be along and say they been in the industry to many years & never needed it before etc etc etc.
if we want to be seen as professionals, then we must act accordingly & show it
I obtained both my chainsaw tickets (ground & climbing) along with my PA1/6 just over 20 years ago. The chainsaw use does not change but pesticides do. I really need to upgrade this.
As for chainsaw work, I don't do a lot nowadays but always wear PPE & it frightens me when I see guys without so much as a pair of goggles or earplugs, let alone ballistic trousers waving around a 4''bar on a saw! Mind you I have seen somebody slice their arm open whilst up a tree & also somebody messing about with a saw & luckily for him his trousers stopped the saw rather than his flesh!
It's only once you have seen or had the accident & the possbile insurance claims fallout, that you think, maybe I should of done it!
I don’t think that some clients are lax, I think they just live in a world not dominated by the Humphrey Appleby, civil servant type of mentality. Most of us work on trust, having a relationship with our clients. They trust us.
I think our professionalism isn’t judged on waving tickets in the air. It’s judged on our complete reliability, our dedication and care in what we do and our producing a perfect, top draw finish. It’s judged on us delivering an exceptional service.
Yes, I have all the insurance etc. that I should have and work within sensible parameters, always wearing ear defenders [even with battery kit] and eye protection etc.
But the sheer amount of gardeners I have personally seen, with all the training and relevant tickets, being careless, uninterested, and unprofessional and thus producing a terrible mess is amazing. So no, having a ticket is certainly no guarantee of professionalism.
The shocking mess I used to get when many years ago I sub contracted a so called professional sprayer, with a ticket, was jaw droppingly bad.
I have already told this story on here, but it’s worth re-telling.
A friend of mine works for a large gardening company. He is in his late twenties. He and four other workmates from the same company were sent on spraying course. My friend paid attention to the course and the other four didn’t. They all sat the test at the end of the day and my friend passed and the other four all failed.
The people running the spraying course said ‘we can’t have an 80% failure rate’. So they asked all five to go back the next morning which they did. Then they got my friend who passed to sit with all four of his workmates, one at a time, whilst they all took the test again, so he could tell them the answers. So that they all passed. This happened within the last two or three years.
So, how professional does the ticket make those four?
I won’t bore you with more similar stories.
i still say clients are lax - certainly if commercial & not checking contractors credentials, insurances & so on.
wouldnt disagree as professionalism is more than waving tickets but with more than 30 yrs in industry u will have many like that stories but that one is fault of trainers as intent of industry is clear ....
some on here are very anti-establishment, flippant & dismissive about professionalism, training & quals to extent trade / industry image suffers but easy when unaccountable.
were growing as young business with a few guys and liking the challenges. were trying to be professional, experienced with rite quals.
some said about grandfather rights going which good as young blood is up & comming & needed by industry.
thats my view, but respect yours
I've worked on big construction sites, private estates, commercial gardens and private gardens. I have seen na massive number of people with tickets that I are completely incompetent. I have seen people without out tickets that work with the up most skill and diligence. A ticket is no replacement for common sense. It is big money maker and in reality just another tax for the working man!
You can't disagree that someone using equipment for years and years will be more skilfull than others new to the game clutching their freshly minted certificate. However training is more a way to set a baseline that everyone qualified knows the basics. You can't teach a skill in a day or three but you can teach people how to recognise how to use the kit safely, how to maintain and learn to recognise dangerous scenarios. People used to learn by on the job and if they injured themselves they were told to get on with it ...unfortunately people are different now. If you told a staff member to 'pick it up as you go' and they injured themselves or others then you are in the brown stuff, not them. Businesses need that protection and so do the staff.....
I think that the younger generations have missed out. I am 55 and was brought up in a different world really. I am a Farmer’s son and therefore lived on a farm. When I was perhaps 8 or 9 I was driving tractors, competently. At 12 or 13 I was baling. I knew how to feed and what to feed cattle. I could operate the grain roller and feed/grain mixer. I could fire a shotgun, safely. I used to drive the car around the farmyard when I was 10 or 11. I could reverse a tractor and trailer around corners at the same age. I knew how to attach implements to tractors. I could milk a cow when I was 7. I used to help to mix the spray chemicals when I was 9 or 10. We used to build tree houses and make dens out of bales, two story dens. We used to build and repair bikes. I had a motorbike when I was 12 that I used to ride around our farm. I had a pony when I was five and so learned to ride. So I had a pretty extensive skill set by the time I was 16.
My nephew is 12 and apart from when he is at school, he is glued to computer games. I would suggest that he has been disadvantaged by his technological immersion. How much better would it have been for him to have had the kind of childhood that I had instead.
So those of my generation and background were already trained by long experience to a large extent when we first started. The first time I sat on a Ransomes triple [aged 19] there was no problem. I just mowed grass as if I had done it for years. I first used a petrol hedge cutter professionally in 1986 and could just do it perfectly, it was just instinctive. The same with a tractor and flail hedge cutter at 19. Also at 19 I was mowing with a tractor and a set of Ransome 5/7 gang mowers and I was mowing all the grass for North Nott’s County Council with a Ransomes 5/3 [like the modern Ransomes triple but with five cylinder mowers].
My Father was also brought up on a farm. He was taught by his father, as my grandfather was in his turn by his father and so on going back in time. This is how it used to be. My father was a champion ploughman, winning many trophies. He also won awards for the best crops in the area. I used to watch him doing a ‘James Herriot’ with his arm inserted up to the shoulder inside a cow about to give birth. I witnessed many calves being born. He was a superb and knowledgeable agronomist and cattle expert. He never had a formal day’s training in his life and therefore never had a ticket. You didn’t need one then. Yet he knew precisely how and when to apply selective weed killer, nitrate fertilizer and when to plant and when to harvest. How and when to plough and work down. He knew how to do all these things around the seasons and the unpredictable weather.
This is why I baulk at certain rules and regulations and the nanny state of ever more training needed to do fairly basic things. It is now illegal for a farmer to have his son on a tractor, even as a passenger, until he is 13. You can actually be prosecuted if caught. How sad for very young farmers now.
I much prefer the old way of doing things. It was safer and more productive. Being immersed in all of this from a young age was a far better education than a two day training course and a bloody ticket could ever be.
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