David as an instructor in a number of areas I also agree - I have received a hounding from my peers and alike for saying that someone wasn't competent and I stood by my statment and had their assessment tools with comments on to back that up. At a brigade level, we are hard on our people, they must demonstrate the competnecy several times and we reinforce the fact that they need to do it as an automatic action, not have to stop and think about it - usually this works and people understand the risk if they are not competent.
