Its hard to get information in the UK.
Its used more like currency now days or a fence to keep people away from lucrative fields of work. Its not like the US or it seems the rest of the world were a lot of information is traded for free. Our training establishments rely on people not knowing things, it then allows them to sell their courses to them.
Yes training and information in the UK has become a growing industry.
The likes of British Standards are a laugh, which country in its right mind publishes major recommended safety standards and then charges a small fortune for people to get a copy of them?
As you say you are not planning to use the information in this country, so like everybody else, should you not be allowed access to the information for free, you can't use it unless your GSR anyway?
So I suppose, if you know already, they can't make money by telling you, so they don't tell you.
The problem is keeping information secret probably leaves many people ignorant of many things they should know.
You will notice that perhaps the older guys probably know a lot more about different things than the younger, probably because most of them learnt the game when it was wide open and the likes of nationalised BG would usually tell you anything for free.
Any subject ignorance was not looked upon as a local cash point for future sales but a person interested in the subject for the sake of interest and so information was usually freely supplied.
My thinking is that information should be free for anybody to get. The like, of gas work is now probably 80% knowledge based compared to what it once was and so with the help of government regulation a huge exclusive information mountain now exists which can be mined and sold like gold.
I doubt it will change either, one of the causes of the restriction is that training courses have to now be financed by the training places, as the government has stopped funding and one way to get people to buy courses is tell them nothing and let them pay for it.
The government has helped that situation to come about, through the gas regs, that states you must show you have gas knowledge to work on gas. So were do you get the knowledge from?
Expensive courses or very expensive books. And there is not much really new knowledge involved, most of it has probably been around for years, so all they have to do is recycle and repackage it, and they can then sell it to you for loads of cash.
It's good business if you think in business terms and great for governments who do not then have to pay out for training colleges. Problem is the customer eventually pays for it all and can't find out what they are really paying for?
