Where are the WERs?

I’ve just completed the Birmingham leg of Business Micros’ popular We Come to You promotion visiting customers who pay for our support service to make sure they are getting the maximum value from their software and demonstrating new programmes.

Along with two of our sales and installation team, I met 46 fabricators in four days. This might seem like a hectic schedule but when I point out that most of these fabricators were within a few miles of each other and between them were probably only producing 650 windows per week, then it becomes clear that many of these were very small businesses.

Whilst they were all making a living fabricating just a few windows a week each and some were even interested in purchasing new software from us, what concerned me about my trip was the sense that there now exist two quite distinct sectors of the industry, with the gap being most obvious in terms of these companies’ attitudes to WERs.

Reading the trade magazines, it is easy to imagine that the whole industry is fully geared for the introduction of WERs and that there will be a smooth transition in October which benefits both the industry and its customers.

But my recent experience tells me that is not the case. Only three out of the 46 companies I visited were seeking to achieve accreditation. Some showed almost no awareness of the scheme at all, others were aware but weren’t interested in conforming and others understood their obligations but said they simply couldn’t afford the costs involved in achieving accreditation.

Similarly, as a software provider, Business Micros is reviewing whether it should look to provide a U-value calculator which will satisfy the requirement of the WER scheme, but the feedback so far suggests that there is simply not sufficient demand to justify our development and marketing costs.

Viewed together, these two observations should surely serve as a wake-up call not only to the likes of BFRC and CERTASS but also to the systems and glass companies who need to galvanise whole sectors of the market quickly if we are not to end up with a truly two tier industry.

Those companies who have invested in the accreditations will rightly feel cheated if they are undercut by smaller businesses who simply haven’t bothered. And, the credibility of the whole scheme will be undermined if there remains this hard core of very small fabricators who can continue to operate outside of it.

If the WER scheme is policed as it should be, then these small companies will be in big trouble come October, but will Building Control departments under pressure from government spending cuts have the resources to do what is required?