Chairman's Report 2011

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The past year has been a busy one for the committee.

Considerable work has been done once again on the Fire Detection and Gas Extinguishing Systems and some finality has been reached on registration criteria, initially, the “grandfather” clause. More definition will hopefully, be reached at a meeting scheduled for next Thursday.

The revised constitution has been circulated for comment and will hopefully see the light of day later this year. It was also agreed in committee that travel allowances would be paid to members to attend authorised meetings approved by the committee. These meetings in general were at the SABS.

The training committee under Tom Dreyer is to meet later this month and will discuss common aspects of training organisations and iron out the peer review system which the committee felt needed to be done more formally in the future in terms of common content. A meeting was held with the DOL this week at our request, to discuss the mandate to SAQCC Fire, and other issues.

The SAQCC as at the end of May had registered 1194 technicians – up by 109 on the same time in 2010 and 351 trainees, up by 32 on last year.

The SABS are reporting to us 420 registered SABS 1475 companies, a drop of 20 companies as at last year. This they attribute to stricter control of non-paying companies and advice from the SAQCC on Companies without the necessary registered technicians. The growth in technicians is an interesting event in an economy still struggling to gain some lost ground. Still unregistered companies operate without registered technicians, although this I believe is becoming less.

On the financial side, our Treasurer has kept a tight rein on your committee and a R377 933 net surplus was recorded at the provisional year end. Income was up R84k whilst expenditure was down R54k which contributed to the surplus. The total at year end was marginally over R2 million and the committee has been requested to put forward ideas which would benefit the registered technicians and trainees. We await submission of these as the committee fully believes we cannot continue to keep growing our reserves without ideas on how to best use them.
During the year under review, the income rental was lost as Fire Systems Training moved to share larger premises. This space will or could be used for FD & GES registration.

The website has been extremely busy during the year and more useful additions taken place.

The marketing group have several new and innovative ideas and should be up and running soon as they try to ensure the registered technician is catered for and the committee reaches them. It is highly important that as a committee, we realise that the real owners of this process are the registered technicians and that we must make every effort to keep in touch and give solid and good advice to them to enable them to do a better job and spread the ideals of the SAQCC Fire.

On a formal note, I would like to thank every member of the Committee for their input and lastly, thanks to Rosemary Cowan our hardworking administrator for a job well done.

Thank you.

CHAIRMAN
BRETT JONES

For further information, contact SAQCC-Fire on tel. 011 455-3157.