Jim wrote:
All critics of this installation are ill informed.

(Jim is also a critic. Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, thus
Socrates is mortal. What, dear readers, can we similarly and
syllogistically conclude about Jim? ;-)

The poor womans death was avoidable, as is all domestic electrocutions
Nah. Deliberate suicides are not avoidable; nor can extreme stupidity be
defended against under the engineering balance which the Regs (thank
gawd) represent. It'll be a sad sad day when the IEE engineering
regs-writers get replaced by CYA lawyers...

All house holders know that electricity is dangerous but choose not to
have their system checked and modernised usually because of the cost.

You appear to be claiming that a 60quid periodic inspection would have
found the fault which proved fatal in this case. I dispute such a claim
- I don't believe that it's standard operating procedure to measure the
potential wrt earth of every bit of metalwork in every room (or even
just in the kitchen) which isn't obviously part of an appliance. In this
case, there was a metal cutlery/utensil rack above the cooker; what
proportion of sparkies doing a periodic inspection would have thought to
measure its potential (or even wave a voltstick in its direction)?

We've noted that an RCD on the relevant circuit would've prevented this
fatality. But BS7671 doesn't necessarily require that the final circuit
on which a cooker hood sits is RCD protected. It will be if it's fed off
a downstairs ring, by virtue of the "reasonably foreseen to supply
portable appliances outside the equipotential zone" rule; but not if
it's fed off a lighting circuit (not uncommon, nothing wrong with it),
or off a radial dedicated to fixed appliances in the kitchen.

Well here we have an example of the cost, a womans life.
A modern electrical installation to BS7671 is safe.
The choice to have one or not is a free choice, the owner of this home
chose not to.

"Safe" is a relative, not an absolute, term. It's clear that (as is
usually the case with accidents in reasonably-managed situations)
multiple factors contributed. Here, they we initial poor routing of
the cooker hood cable; failure of the householder to check for buried
cables when installing the metal rack on the wall; failure of the
occupants to react more decisively to the "tingle" they felt. We can
argue the toss about the relative contributions of these factors. But
only the first of these is a Regs-compliance issue, and that (as I've
argued above) would *not* be picked up by an after-the-fact inspection,
as the poorly routed cable was not visible. The other two factors
concern education and common sense in the general population; a purely
technical fix is not appropriate (no, not even mandating "every circuit
shall have its own RCBO" - as has been pointed out many times over the
years in this group, loss of lighting during fires causes more
fatalities and injuries than are prevented by RCD protection on lighting
circs).

Stefek