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Architects and commission at odds

The SA Council for the Architectural Profession (Sacap) is at loggerheads with the Competition Commission over restrictions the council wants to place on architectural practitioners according to their competency and expertise to protect the public. Yashaen Luckan, the president of Sacap, said yesterday that all the built environment professional councils had an identification of works (IDoW) policy, which outlined the scope of work of practitioners in their various categories according to the competency of their training and experience. Luckan said if there was no IDoW, under-skilled professionals could take on work for which they did not have the professional competence to undertake, and there was no incentive after entering the profession after one year of study to further their studies, which posed risks to the quality of work and higher education institutions. A different level of competency and experience was needed to design a house and a high-rise A-grade building in Sandton, he added.

But Luckan said the Competition Commission felt the IDoW restricted lower categories of practitioners from doing certain work and was restricting competition and an unfair business practice. He said Sacap was arguing that if you did not delineate a scope of work in terms of the IDoW per category based on the practitioner’s training and competency, you put the public at risk. “What the Competition Commission wants to implement will compromise quality of work,” he said. Marella O’Reilly, the registrar and chief executive of Sacap, the regulator of the architectural profession, said the Architectural Professions Act of 2000 segregated the four different categories of architectural professionals that undertook work. These categories are professional draughts persons, professional architectural technologists, professional senior architectural technologists and professional architects.

In line with international practice, only architects were registered in terms of the Architects Act of 1970. Luckan said Sacap’s IDoW could not be implemented because the commission believed it was restrictive. He added that it was contradictory for the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) to be able to restrict the value of tenders that contractors could bid for in terms of their CIDB grading, but not allow Sacap to implement its IDoW policy.

Source: www.iol.co.za

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Architects and commission at odds

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