I can imageine that a lot of Electricians in Scotland are very busy trying to get this done so the properties are compliant with BS7671 and the forthcoming amended Scottish law. 

It does feel similar to when all UK (England) rental dwellings needed a satifactory EICR before they could be rented out with the properties that were already in tenancy agreements had to follow within the year regardless of if a new tenancy started or was continued. 

I think 30mA RCBO (Type A or above) protection is good to have in a dwelling regardless of if rented or not but I think that some installs may fall foul of this meaning a new CU/DB would be needed as 30mA RCBO are not always avaible to retro fit for every brand.  Imagine a Wylex 3036 or similar.  Also worth considering that if RCD protection is to be installed then a type2/3 should also be advocated.

Valid points there AMK.  On the point of using outdated versions I did caveat this scenario.

These could be published in a PDF format with a watermark on every page stating that this is not the current or latest version and for the current version can be found on the BSI web site.

Hi Chris

I do think that all CC libraries should have access to the British Standards.  Let see if any senior BSI people enter the debate to educate me/us as to why this is wrong.  It does seem that sometimes things/information get hidden behind PayWalls. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

I do think that all CC libraries should have access to the British Standards. 

Agreed.

And I'm sure BSI would be very happy to sell them to them... In the end BSI is a business, and libraries have (very!) limited budget and need to decide what's going to add value to the majority of their customers. I'm not saying I agree with that position, but it is where we are. 

Sergio Fernandez said:

Let see if any senior BSI people enter the debate to educate me/us as to why this is wrong. 

I can't imagine anyone from BSI comes on here, but in any case I'm sure their answer would be that, as above, they are a business, anyone is free to buy their standards. They are (as I understand it) a non-profit business, but they still have to cover their costs. If they make standards freely available then this will reduce their income unless they push up the prices to those who do pay for them. (Again, rightly or wrongly.)

I would suggest that this would need government expenditure / intervention, and I can't see a case being made here is to why it is to the public benefit for standards to be freely available. I'm not saying there isn't a case, but it does need to be made clear. I'd suggest it needs to be shown that someone is at risk of loss or harm due to not having free access to standards. Remembering that if a member of the public does suffer loss or harm due to, e.g., a piece of equipment being falsely or incorrectly declared as compliant to a standard then it would be e.g. Trading Standards or HSE who would be pursuing this - who have access to both to the standards and to the expert opinion to interpret it. 

Which is a further point, any of us who are in the business of interpreting standards know that this is rarely straightforward, tbh I feel the cost of the standards pales into insignificance compared to the professional costs involved in understanding them - for the average member off the public they would need to employ an expert to assist anyway. Of course there are some of us in the middle, as I suspect many of us on this thread are, professionals using standards for non-chargeable work (in my case going into Savoy Place to read BS7671 for working on my own house wiring!). But I suspect the response would be that this isn't something for (that much overused term) "the taxpayer" to fund - it would be a benefit to us, not a reduction in public risk.

Yes, particularly as I am a bit of a standards nerd, I would love to have free access to standards, but I really struggle to come up with a convincing argument as to why I should have that access. But very happy if someone can! 

Thanks,

Andy

At one time Hampshire CC libraries subscribed,

I too recall a teenage me cycling to the local library in Shenfield in Essex  to view a copy of a standard that have been got there specially for me as an intra-library loan request from Chelmsford or somewhere - but that was in the 1970s. And I was probably a fairly odd teenager then to bother. (and maybe a fairly odd adult now to bother too but let's not go there right  now)
I suspect that there is no BSI discount for libraries however, and they will have looked at their catalogues and what it costs and decided that it is more important to stock stuff that is more commonly requested.

And you get a  lot more sheets of paper per pound spent for a typical book ;-) 

Governments do sometimes reach into their pockets for the national interest.

For some time now the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has offered free read-only (not print or cut and paste) access to all US standards called up in legislation 

It does not seem to have driven ANSI to bankruptcy, even though given how often one standard then calls up another, it means sometimes quite a lot of documents are involved when  though the regulations refer to just the first one in the tree.

Defence standards (and the US/NATO milspecs ) have been free for years, you just need the right clearances to download  some of them - the EMC standards are particularly good compared to commercial euronorms ;-)

Mike

One of the great privileges of studying at Cambridge, Oxford, or Trinity College, Dublin is access to their legal deposit libraries. Everybody else has to make do with the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales and the British Library.

It seems highly likely that any major university which teaches engineering will have a library subscription to BSOL - British Stands On Line, not least because of the need to be able to read a standard.

There is not a back catalogue as such - obsolete standards remain available on line. The exception is very old editions, which are paper only. Of course, the aforementioned LDLs probably have their own copies.

Hi Mike

Did you get a chance to watch the YouTube video?  What were you thoughts?

URL is below

 First half is about lead levels and the need for testing for lead.  2nd half is about the RCD

youtu.be/-aJ-XHJjetI

In northern Ireland BS docs (British Standards) are available in all the local libraries for anyone a friend tells me.  They also inform me that the quality of electrical work in NI is high. 

Chris Pearson said:

So should the BSI be nationalised and funded by the tax-payer?

Full disclosure for the purpose of this debate: Personally, I think so, although I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as that in practice, and a compromise of being able to access via the local library or even a significant subsidy would be a massive improvement.

Andy Millar said:

I would suggest that this would need government expenditure / intervention, and I can't see a case being made here is to why it is to the public benefit for standards to be freely available. I'm not saying there isn't a case, but it does need to be made clear.

While I would agree with arguments to the effect that there would be a public safety benefit, I think that this would be one of several reasons. Top of my head I would raise

1. That some laws, and more commonly ACOPs and the like, make reference to standards, and, as some have already said, these references may well go several standards "deep", making even a cursory investigation potentially expensive. For sure in many cases it would take a specialist to make a reasonable judgement and the answer may not be useful to a "layperson", but if one uses the same logic we would not have public access to legal databases
2. There is likely to be a "commercial" benefit to the nation by improving productivity / quality and by reducing wasted time and materials.
3. It would likewise facilitate both innovation and international competitiveness by reducing (nee removing) the cost of access to standards, particularly levelling the playing field for smaller businesses and start-ups

I might also be tempted to ask whether anyone can suggest how the current situation wherein standards are not freely available is in the public interest. After all, the standards themselves are produced by volunteers, are they not?

For scale, BSI's turnover was ~£670M last accounting year, not all of which will have come from sale of standards to the UK and some of which was profit, which using my nearest as a benchmark, is about 1.5 NHS general hospitals. Absolutely not saying this should be in competition (!) but while it's a lot of money I'd hazard not beyond the pale.