Bar to self-employment.

[BAJR]

Right.... this is a strict policy of getting this back on track....

a recap....

Bar to self-employment.

[INDENT] I have recently been notified that one of the local authority areas where I work (as a sole trader) has not put me on their contractor list pending some more info from me. Fair enough, and I will just have to accept the five month delay in telling me this, as I know they have been severely understaffed. The extra info they require from me is easily provided except for a request for a couple of reports produced by my company.

My beef is that I cannot produce reports under my new company name until I actually land some work, which I am unlikely to do if I'm not yet on the contractor lists! I now have good reason to believe that other local authorities where I would like to work have recently adopted similar policies, but presumably they have not yet seen fit to notify me that I am not on their contractor lists. Where does this leave me in this chicken & egg Catch22 situation? Put simply, without any requests to do tenders to land new work. And I thought it was just the recession starting to bite.

This situation is infuriating to me as I have worked in these areas for 6 years producing dozens of reports to a good standard. I understand why the LA's want to have some quality control over who is doing work in their patch, but surely that comes later when they actually monitor work and accept or reject reports? Perhaps their ability to monitor has been so curtailed by cutbacks that they see this as a simpler way to monitor, by just excluding the new boys, and sticking with the established units who never had this massive hurdle to clear.


Of course there are ways around this, all of which will make for some very lean times until I can actually get on the contractor lists.

What do BAJRites think? [/INDENT]

as a postscript

With the possibility of becoming a chartered organisation looming

Oh really - I see talk, but no loom? Which is a very different beast.

Chartered BAJRs... there... said it... oh... what do you mean it does not mean it will happen.. (I do agree with some form of requirement however)

if asked I would direct poeple to the RO list rather than the Yellow Pages as it does, in my view, have some validity in terms of quality assurance.

oh really - I thought you provide the quality assurance?

a curator would be on firm legal footing to require all planning related work to be carried out by IfA members or ROs.

Would you care to test whether you can legally require people to be the member of an organisation that currently has no legal standing other than it exists? BAJR exists... but I would suspect you would not include that list (as some curators do... ) because of course BAJR never maintains any accountability or checks on companies