Adrian wrote:
On Sat, 02 Nov 2013 10:01:30 +0000, charles wrote:

That favours the larger manufacturers who can invest in production
changes necessary to meet the standard.
Supposing yo have s small manufacturer supplying larger toilets to
the North West of Scotland. A standard designed to save water in
Spain would be irrelevant but could put him out of business. This is
just an illustration.

A manufacturer who is incapable of making such basic and
straightforward design changes is not a viable business.

It's not thedesign change - that's easy. It's setting up a new
production line is the expense.

Which makes _no_ difference whatsoever to the statement you just replied
to.

A business can be perfectly viable until the government brings in rule
changes, adding regulatory burdens which then make the business unviable.

As was pointed out, the design costs for a new product are minimal. What
costs the money is redesigning, rebuilding and debugging the production
process and testing the new product for compliance with the new rules,
especially as, when so often happens with British governments, the EU
rules are extended in their scope by the British implementation.

If you've got a dozen production lines, as the big manufacturers have,
then it's a small proportion of your output lost at any one time. At the
other extreme, if you only make one item, then it's *all* of your
production capacity that's out of commission, and very few companies can
survive that for any length of time..

--
Tciao for Now!

John.