The Government is being urged to intervene to help resolve problems in the body repair trade.

The Body Repair Industry Campaign says self-regulation by trade associations will never succeed on its own.

Following the Retail Motor Industry Federation (RMI)’s announcement last week that it was no longer co-operating with the Office of Fair Trading to agree a code of practice for the retail motor industry - including motor body repairers – BRIC spokesman Shaun o'Reilly says: "The dysfunctional nature of the body repair market is such that only outside intervention will rectify the problems within it.

All trade associations, such as the RMI, the Vehicle and Body Repairers Association and the Scottish Motor Trade Association ), he says, "have been wholly ineffective at working together to bring a universal, recognisable and properly policed standard into the marketplace that will gain widespread consumer acceptance".

"All the previous schemes simply fail to address the issues the industry faces," said O’Reilly. "Carwise was the eleventh scheme that we are aware of, that the industry has seen over the past thirty years. It is about time the government grabbed hold of the problem and adopted the licensing option."