The CEng route in the UK is now a 4-year Master of Engineering Degree (it was a 3 year BEng when I did it), plus 2 years additional training, plus 2 years on the job. This is hardly the minimalist approach that Blacksheep describes, I certainly spent a lot of time with my hands dirty before reaching the heady heights I'm at now.
Certainly the amount of work I had to do to get my CEng through the RAeS was anything but minimal, and I had to do even more work a couple years later to get membership of the IMechE.
The problem is however not that system isn't strict - it is, although Windy's boss seems to have slipped through the net somewhere. The problems are (a) that this isn't a license to practice, and (b) the Engineering Council does bugger all then to ensure that people continue to maintain the required standards.
The Eng.Tech / IEng / CEng system would be a good one if anybody (including the EC / RAeS / IMEchE) actually took it seriously by making it a license to practice and actually requiring Engineers to prove that they keep meeting the standards to keep it.
The only CEng I've ever heard of being "struck-off" was done so for selling government secrets to the Russians. If to be in charge of a project / hangar / whatever, you had to be at the right standard, and if you had a really big cock-up (BAC1-11 windscreen?, Dover pier?) were subject to a formal Inquiry by your peers at risk of losing your qualifications the world would be a better place.
This is what the medics do after all.
G