Hi


Several points in one... (several contributors)

I can't believe any would say that. We deal in kilos, so I want to
see
kilos. Do you go into a shop and see a product marked up in pesos?
No you
don't because we use £s.

In fact in Britain we deal in pounds and kilos, and have done for a
very long time. Pounds are one of our standard universal measures.
Britain has used pounds for a _very_ long time, and still does, very
widely.


The said idiot in Sunderland could have displayed pounds, but the law
said
he should also show kilos as that is our official metric.

Official being the word (meaning 'of office'). Our real world standard
measures of weight are kilos and pounds, but our officialdom seems to
have become estranged from that somehow. There is no moral superiority
in kilos over pounds, and local government should not be attempting to
enforce something that simply has no value. In truth his selling in
pounds was (in itself) a non issue.

The _real_ idiot in Sunderland should not have wasted public money and
time, and destroyed the local governments credibility by prosecuting
the market trader who was going about his normal honest and decent
business.

Government relies on public goodwill to work, and if they start
playing that kind of game round here the goodwill's gonna evaporate
quickly. Then when they ask for the public's assistance they get told
where to...

Unfortunately this has happened in several areas with the police, and
the result is high crime in some places, because the public simply
wont co-operate there. Government bodies need to remember what theyre
there for, because public goodwill does matter. It matters because
when that goes, everyone suffers.


Also whats to stop someone doing some work in 2005 and if/when asked
about
certification saying it was completed in 2003 before the regulations?

Changing cable insulation colours, from red/black to blue/brown.



I agree that on a bog standard installation any chimp could do it -
the
difference is knowing which is a bog standard and which isn't - and
why.
When I took the 16th edition one of the questions required you to
work out
the size of an earth conductor. The answer appeared to be a
rediculous size
but when you factored in the losses / grouping / temperature etc. you
could
see why it was necessary. How many unqualified diy'ers would have
fitted the
correct size?

This isnt a serious safety issue. A 1mm2 CPC is sufficient to pop any
RCD (or lighting ring wire fuse), even when uncompliant with regs.
You're confusing regs with the sort of safety level that is necessary
in private dwellings.

To assess the relevance of different measures one has to look at the
consequences of not carrying them out: a smaller than regs CPC will
still work effectively.


Dont forget what we see is only the beginning. Obviously they're not
introducing all the control at once.


Regards, NT