New Electrical Regs - Again

[Peter Saxton]

why is bartering VAT fraud?

--=20 Peter Saxton from London [e-mail]

[Greg Hennessy]

It reduces the strength of the draw on the chimney allegedly.

greg

[PoP]

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."

If they spent half as much money on an anti-smoking campaign.....!

I have countered this, using figures from this RoSPA document:

by a process of simple statistical analysis from the authoritative figures available from RoSPA Nick Raynsford is happy to be saving more lives and injuries than are being lost or incurred from casualties incurred from electrical infrastructure (not appliances, which are not covered by the new regs).

I'm awaiting a further reply. Watch this space.

PoP

[Andy Hall]

He needs to arrange for somebody to write the next form letter for him..... This is part of the standard response. In his reply to me, Raynsford completely ducked some very pertinent issues that I wrote to John Redwood about and asked to be forwarded to him..

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Andy Hall]

Nope. You don't have the right union card.

I ceased contributing to IEE membership some years ago because of the lack of value.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[PoP]

As I understand it you need to be careful with respect to offering discounts where VAT is part of the deal. Customs and Excise can (AFAIK) require you to pay them the original amount of VAT, regardless of the price you sold services for, if they suspect that they are being diddled.

Example: You normally sell a service at £100. VAT man gets the extra £17.50 for each sale. You do a job for a mate at half price. VAT man might decide that you still owe him £17.50 - an effective rate of 35%!

I think it would be rare to have this forced upon you, but I'm sure I read somewhere that if the VAT man thinks you are diddling him out of money he would otherwise have expected to earn ('earn' being an emotive word in this context!) then you might be required to hand over the dosh anyway.

I suppose one situation where this might be applied is if you did a cash-in-hand job and effectively got paid nothing as far as the authorities were concerned. If you were stupid enough to leave a paper trail behind (for example a certification for electrical work) then the authorities can - and most probably would - treat the affair as if you had received the money. Only thing is, if you got caught in one of those situations then you'd be taking on the might of the authorities who would - probably quite reasonably - assume that you are involved in large scale tax evasion.

Like so many tax laws it all depends on circumstances.

PoP

[Andrew Gabriel]

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.

[Steve]

I'm just spoiling for a fight, since I am a chartered electrical engineer, and a member of the bloody IEE. Am I competent ?

Steve

[Tony Bryer]

A requirement for this would make sense: it would pick up the fact that the lighting had not been rewired since the 1920's and was now lethal; the current proposals do nothing about existing substandard installations.

[Tony Bryer]

In fairness, as discussed a while back, what is being proposed here has been the status quo in Australia for ages. In the USA, land of the free, in most states you cannot submit the simplest structural calculations to your local BI unless they are stamped by a PE (Professional Engineer), yet when I was a BCO there were very many people with no formal qualifications who were perfectly able to produce calcs for loft conversions, through rooms etc. But just because other countries do certain things doesn't make them sensible

[Tony Bryer]

Uh? I can see why you can't have an extractor fan and gas fire but a ceiling fan only stirs up the air in the room, without changing anything. Any gas experts care to comment?

[Steve]

So I sue his arse off. No state intervention or rules required. Does his activity materially affect my life in my home ? Yes ? Pay me.

Steve

[PoP]

No problem there - you can do your own wiring at home. But you will have to call in the local council to provide you with a certificate to prove that you have done the job properly.....

PoP

[PoP]

Same here. I have followed up with a reply where I have kept very specifically to fact, asking for answers from Nick Raynsford. I have also asked Nick Raynsford to get out from behind his desk and do some site visits with me to find out what the real world is about.

I expect to receive the same sort of hogwash back.

PoP

[Simon]

I suppose, Steve, that it boild down to; Is competency in a piece of card or a piece of paper ... or is it in the individual? From my experience, a qualification might be a good start, but it is in the maintenance of knowledge and capability that the real competency exists. I've met some Qualified electricians that couldn't understand why a 12V downlighter that was fitted 6 meters from the transformer was running with as much light as the glow from the end of a cigarette, or that had to phone their supervisors to ask how many double sockets they could put on a ring and their supervisors had to look it up in a book. I beleive it's down to how much effort the individual puts in to maintaining and improving his own knowledge that really signifies competency.

[Steve]

It has definite value to me, just apparently not doing a bloody wiring job at home !

Steve

[Tim]

"Steve" wrote

Sue him for what, exactly?

[Tim]

"Steve" wrote

And what value do you think should be placed on that? Couple of shillings & threppence??

[Steve]

Infirnging my right to peace and freedom, unencumbered by the turkey next door.

Steve

[Dave Plowman]

Think I'd rather put up with some government interference which has no chance of being rigorously enforced rather than resort to suing someone - where only the lawyers would win.