The PCA responds
Quality Assurance is primarily something that is offered by traders as opposed to trade associations.
If we take the motor trade as an example, a manufacturer will usually give certain QA promises, and the retailer will honour those on behalf of the manufacturer, and perhaps enhance them with some added QA promises of their own.
The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) is a mature trade association in an industry that has been going for 150 years. It operates several Codes of Practice, some under the OFT Codes Approval Scheme, and yet with all its wealth, and establishment support, it has nowhere near 100% coverage or support from the motor trade, and I would hazard to say that a lot less than 50% of the independent motor repairers are signed up to any of the codes.
However people still go to these independent garages and, for the most part, get perfectly good jobs done on their cars; it's when things go wrong that customers look for the support of an external body and then they might wish that they'd gone to a garage that was signed up under the Code.
Major vendors in our industry, with all their financial muscle, find it impossible to have a direct relationship with all the resellers in the marketplace, and they are thus unable to certify the majority of them. The best that can happen is that an individual owner manager or employee might have some relevant qualifications, but how many certificates that you might see displayed in someone's premises are up to date?
If big vendors can't directly assess and "guarantee" the work of a reseller, how can the TCA hope to? And how many customers actually take time to interest themselves in certificates & qualifications? Corporate buyers may insist on such things, and indeed might write them into supply contracts, but consumers generally take pot luck, use gut feeling, or the references of friends.
As a general rule, Codes of Practice are useful as a guide to businesses to help them define the minimum acceptable standards of customer service that they should adopt, and they are useful to customers for when things go wrong and they need some help in solving problems; typically the problem boils down to a breakdown in understanding and thus the relationship.
Although our new website is still being populated with data and text, the first thing that we have done is put the Code of Practice there and readers may see it at www.tcauk.org.
Yours sincerely
Keith Warburton F.PCA
