Not when you put it like that. You're paying to have your amateur
workmanship checked by a professional.

On the scale of quality of result, there is an overlap between amateur
and professional. At least some amateurs are capable of better quality
than at least some professionals - there is no hard and fast dividing
line. The problem is that all amateurs are regarded officially as
incompetent, and all professionals competent, which is demonstrably not
the case.

To give some analogous examples:

I am not a professional cook. I have sampled the output of
professionally qualified cooks, and quality has varied wildly, from the
nearly inedible to the sublime. The meals I produce are indubitably
better than the worst I have sampled produced by professionals.

I am not a professional nurse. I have both experienced the care of
professional nurses, and seen those close to me cared for by
professional nurses. I have also seen non-professional nursing of the
long-term ill. I would say the non-professional care I have seen was
of higher quality - including ensuring the correct dosage of
mediacation was supplied and taken; and taken at appropriate times.

I am not a professional driver. The standard of driving on the roads is
such that I prefer not to be driven by professional minicab drivers,
having feared for my life on several occaisions due the appaling
quality of their driving. Bus drivers vary wildly from the excellent to
the appalling, as do heavy goods vehicle drivers.

In the above cases the amateur often has a lower workload, and is not
constrained by economic considerations, so can take the time and
trouble to do a good job. Obviously, there are utterly incompetent
amateurs for all of the above examples. Please note that I am not
trying to equate the difficulty of performing as a professional
electrician with any of the above jobs, merely illustrating the point.

The main thing that engaging a professional does is provide a means of
comeback if a substandard job is performed. It certainly does not
guarantee a minimum standard of performance, contrary to the claims of
many people.

In other European countries, if you make a modification to your
domestic fixed electrical installation, and your house burns down as a
result, your insurance is invalid. If an electrician had made exactly
the same modification, and the house burns down as a result, you claim
against the electrician's insurance. Competence does not come in to
it.

Competent amateurs are in a bind because they have no way of mitigating
the risk of having done a substandard job.

Sid