Today I jump started my car for the first time ever. Could this constitute CPD?
I mean, okay, it's fairly straightforward, but I did have to check how to do it, and it does involve a small amount of knowledge about batteries and electricity.
Registered engineers doing their annual CPD earn the same as non-registered engineers.
Absolutely true. But companies responsible for mission-critical systems can (in principle) use their engineers professional registration as evidence of competence, which means that it is an advantage for those companies to support their staff being professionally registered, which makes staff already professionally registered attractive to those companies. (This is why I have never personally paid any fees to the IEE/IET, my employers have always done it.) So it doesn't increase pay, but it does increase employability.
But if the PEIs don't get their acts seriously together about CPD then the consequence will be that people like me, who are assessing the competence of companies' staff, will be thinking ever more seriously about whether professional registration is really telling us anything useful.
P.S. Anyway, both members and non-members regularly do scramble to find evidence of CPD. It's that bit at the end of the CV we struggle with in job applications where we all wonder which courses we did when. Now if only we'd kept a nice record somewhere online where we could find it at a moment's notice 
Registered engineers doing their annual CPD earn the same as non-registered engineers.
Absolutely true. But companies responsible for mission-critical systems can (in principle) use their engineers professional registration as evidence of competence, which means that it is an advantage for those companies to support their staff being professionally registered, which makes staff already professionally registered attractive to those companies. (This is why I have never personally paid any fees to the IEE/IET, my employers have always done it.) So it doesn't increase pay, but it does increase employability.
But if the PEIs don't get their acts seriously together about CPD then the consequence will be that people like me, who are assessing the competence of companies' staff, will be thinking ever more seriously about whether professional registration is really telling us anything useful.
P.S. Anyway, both members and non-members regularly do scramble to find evidence of CPD. It's that bit at the end of the CV we struggle with in job applications where we all wonder which courses we did when. Now if only we'd kept a nice record somewhere online where we could find it at a moment's notice