How to prepare for the MCS assessment

MCS is a scheme; the assessment is done by somebody else

This trips up most people at the start. MCS sets the standards. The assessment against those standards is carried out by a UKAS-accredited certification body that you choose and pay separately — NAPIT, NICEIC, HIES, Gas Safe and others operate in this space. You are their client, and their assessor is the person you will be speaking to.

That matters for preparation, because the certification body decides the order of events, what evidence they want to see up front and how they run the onboarding call. Two installers certifying through different bodies will describe quite different experiences, and both will be right.

The quality management system is the bulk of it

Every MCS applicant needs a documented quality management system covering how work is quoted, designed, installed, commissioned, handed over and put right when something goes wrong. Assessors are looking for a system you can actually follow, evidenced by real jobs.

You do not have to write one from a blank page. Certification bodies and third parties sell MCS-ready QMS templates, and most small installers start from one and adapt it. What gets picked up at assessment is a template that has been bought and not adapted — procedures describing a business that is not yours, referring to roles nobody holds and forms nobody fills in.

• ·Name the real people against the real roles, even if that is one person against all of them.
• ·Keep the forms you say you keep. An assessor will ask for a completed one.
• ·Make the complaints procedure match what you would genuinely do.
• ·If a procedure describes something you do not do, change the procedure, not the answer.

Competence: the qualification route

You need to evidence that the people carrying out the work are competent to do it. For air source heat pumps that normally means a recognised heat pump qualification, and for anyone coming from a plumbing background it usually also means demonstrating the underpinning Level 3 knowledge — which is where an RPL route is often used rather than starting a full apprenticeship again.

Where refrigerant circuits are broken into, F-Gas certification is a separate requirement on top. A monobloc install that does not disturb the sealed refrigerant circuit is a different case from a split system, and the qualifications you need follow from which you are actually installing.

The onboarding call

Before the first audit, most certification bodies run an onboarding or pre-assessment call. It is not a trick. The assessor is establishing that you understand your own QMS, that you know what you are certifying for, and that you are ready to be audited rather than three months away from it.

The questions that catch people out are not technical. They are about who signs off a design, where the commissioning records live, what happens if a customer complains, and how you would evidence an installation from twelve months ago. If you have to invent an answer on the call, the audit will find the same gap.

What to have ready before you book

Preparation is mostly assembly. Almost none of it needs to be created from nothing if the business is already trading.

• ·Your adapted QMS, with your name and your roles in it.
• ·Qualification certificates for everyone doing the work.
• ·Insurance at the cover types MCS requires - public liability alone is not one of them.
• ·Consumer code membership — MCS requires it, and it is a separate application.
• ·One or two complete example jobs: quote, design, commissioning record, handover pack.
• ·Your calculation method for heat loss, and evidence you have used it.

Common questions