On 4 Oct 2003 14:44:35 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

How many lives will these new regulations save?

According to the horses mouth - Nick Raynsford MP who is the minister
in charge of this shoddy legislation - his following response was
returned - I have a copy of the official letter from him to me. I
quote his words verbatim:

"We estimate the new requirements should reduce the number of deaths
by about 8 per year, injuries by about 550 per year and fires by about
1500 per year in England and Wales. These are reductions of up to 30%
over the current rates and the savings from these reductions
significantly outweigh the extra costs arising from the new
requirements."

If they spent half as much money on an anti-smoking campaign.....!

I have countered this, using figures from this RoSPA document:

http://www.rospa.com/factsheets/pdfs/electricity.pdf

Essentially by a process of simple statistical analysis from the
authoritative figures available from RoSPA Nick Raynsford is happy to
be saving more lives and injuries than are being lost or incurred from
casualties incurred from electrical infrastructure (not appliances,
which are not covered by the new regs).

I'm awaiting a further reply. Watch this space.

PoP