In article ,
PoP writes:
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."

They made a big mistake in the calculations though -- they included
all the incidents due to appliances (which is most of them), not just
those due to the electrical installation. If you use the right figures,
the lives saved per year is less than one. I don't know where the 30%
comes from -- the government's Regulatory Impact Assessment of the
proposed legislation calculated a drop of 20% in deaths and 10% in
injuries (or was it the other way round, I forget now).
Oh, hang on -- got it -- if you add those two numbers togther, you get
30% -- that's on a par with the quality of the rest of the technical
analysis, sadly.

--
Andrew Gabriel
Consultant Software Engineer