Since the European Commission finalised the requirements in December 2007, industry representatives through ACRIB have been working with existing awarding bodies (City and Guilds and CITB) to come up with a top-up qualification for those who already have refrigerant handling or S/NVQ qualifications. The new F Gas qualification is still under development and consultation, and will be presented to UK Government at the end of January.

Whilst most UK engineers have been assessed in refrigerant handling to the City and Guilds 2078 or CITB standard over the past 15 years, the new F Gas standard will be a much more thorough and wide ranging examination. It will include a range of observed practical assessments and a multiple choice examination which will test the knowledge of underpinning principles. John Ellis, Past President of the IOR and Past Chairman of ACRIB who has reviewed the specification in detail, comments: “This is the first time that an assessment specification has been written into a Regulation on refrigerant handling. There is no doubt it will be tough to comply with, but it would have been a lot worse without the work of ACRIB and DEFRA negotiating at a European level.”

Only those who have taken the new F Gas assessment will be recognised as competent throughout the whole of Europe, so in order to work with F Gas refrigerants, the sooner the new certificate is obtained the better. The Commission requires that all technicians should have obtained this new qualification by January 2009. However the UK Government will be consulting in the early summer on whether to allow a further three years (up to July 2011) for existing personnel to obtain the new qualification. ACRIB is pressing to ensure that the UK is granted an extension of the full three years to complete certifications. In the mean time , of course,  the existing certificates C&G 2078 or CITB equivalent  continue to be the existing national legal requirement for both F Gas and ODS (ozone depleting substance) refrigerant handling.