In the new world of 'fear' we live in. Where helicopter parenting and fear programming is spreading like the plaque to all areas of life. It is sad to say, but regulation is going to be the inevitable. Especially with the amount of injury and death in the field. Be it ANSI, OSHA, or insurance companies as a whole banding together and refusing to cover people and/or accidents caused by people who don't play by their rules. On both the professional liablility side, health/safety side, and the homeowner coverage side.
I think the best possible thing we can do is to participate in the conversation leading up to it and try to steer it in a direction that might actually work for everyone involved. If we don't challenge for compromise on their end we will end up with only what they want. As you are seeing with this new regulation in UK, where the citizens/workers didn't/don't have a voice.
There's a lot to be learned from the rope access community. SPRAT does good things for their industry and has saved a lot of life since its inception. What I like about them is my understanding that they are a nonprofit conglomeration of rope access professionals who got together to do just that. Key word being nonprofit. That being said they work in an entirely different environment with an entirely different set of risks and hazards. With an entirely different scope of work, with an entirely different client base, mostly all large corporations with bottomless pockets.
That being said, despite the lives they've saved and the good they've done, we don't want them writing our rule book. Yet, as a group of professionals in their field, they got together and wrote their own. That's where we can learn from them. I'd much rather see regulations dictating work practices and safety of tree workers be written by the yet nonexistant Society of Professional TREE Access Technicians! A nonprofit group of tree access professionals banding together and writing their own rules.
We currently have little say in the regulatory world because we as individuals have little voice. Choose not to participate in 'their.' Fighting the inevitable tooth and nail till the point that it is too late. Don't want ridiculous regulation written by people who don't know any better, NOW is the time to get together and make your voice known. Just remember it will be a compromise. Regulation will happen, it is the inevitable, and certain parts of it you likely won't like. Perhaps we can make our voices heard and mitigate some of the worst of it into something workable.