[carnivalpete]

REF #109-Representing a UK electrical accessory company's interests, I was on a BSI accessories work group around the time it became mandatory for all electrical products sold in the UK to be fitted with fused UK 13A plugs. I witnessed many laboratory demonstrations of how the slender and overloaded continental supply leads with moulded-on 2 pin unfused plugs could cause fire damage. Some of the material was made public and dressed up as a serious safety issue, but that was certainly not the main reason discussed outside the committee room. It was naked, commercial, self interest. A standard Europlug could have put some small UK electrical companies out of business and badly dented the profitability of others. All of our BStandards at that time started off on world-wide International Standards committees, then got passed down the committee chain to be slightly modified by European Standards committees who had them rubber stamped by all European members as individual country standards, including BStandards. Moulded on continental 2 pin plugs were very cheap to manufacture and available, along with massive ranges of attendant sockets, from many large continental plug suppliers. Although there seemed to be a lot of different European plug designs around at that time, many of them would fit into each others sockets and there was some enthusiasm for the move. The European plan was to agree one unfused moulded-on 2 pin Europlug design which would then be adopted as a mandatory fitting by all European countries, including the UK. To help preserve the massive UK plug and socket business, there was considerable very high level political manoeuvring which resulted in the UK fused 13A plug being hastily built into UK law and into (BSI) Wiring Standards. Since then, by law, all electrical products sold in the UK have to be pre-fitted with a correctly fused UK 13 plug. Politics aside, I still believe it was the right thing to do. pete