And "Reasonable provision shall be made in the design and installation of electrical installations in order to protect persons operating, maintaining or altering the installations from fire or injury" is just as non-prescriptive as "No person shall carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting or gas storage vessel unless he is competent to do so".
True - neither matters until the brown stuff hits the fan. If you are stood there in the dock being asked questions, one of them will be "what training or qualifications do you have to allow you to claim competence ?"
I don't think something like "I've been doing it for years with no problems" or "I learned some stuff off the internet" will get you very far. On the other hand, an electrician able to cite C&G this that and the other, or a gas person citing whatever their qualifications are, is likely to get more respect.
But that isn't enough anyway. I was told a story of a local gas fitter, who found that a particular gas hob was difficult to fit using any service valve being sold at that time and specifically marked as for gas use. He did find another valve - good quality, made of brass, etc - which he assessed as being suitable and which made the job a lot easier/neater. After using about 10 of these, one of his customers smelt gas (not actually coming from the valve) and called BG - who on spotting this valve without any magic markings reported him. The upshot was, that he ended up before the beak, who took the attitude that "the valve wasn't specifically marked as for gas use - therefore guilty".
That's the story as relayed to me - though I can't say if there wasn't anything else behind it that's not included.
But if you follow modern lawmaking, especially during Tony Bliars reign, you'll see there's been a big shift in legal style. They've moved a lot from prescriptive stuff, to "you must assess" type of stuff. Part of that is deliberate as a key objective (AFAICT) is to make laws as vague as possible and so stop people from doing stuff you don't want them to do - but can't make illegal. Ie, the boundaries are so vague that people have to stay well away from the grey areas in order to avoid straying "into danger". Thus laws to control "extreme terrorism" or "extreme pornography" being used for stuff that's well bluntly neither of those and to most people not objectionable. The key is making it so that people cannot find out in advance if something (often considered completely acceptable) is illegal or not - that way you can "write the law" afterwards and get away with effectively banning stuff that you'd never have got through openly.
But I digress. Back a bit closer to topic, consider fire precautions in buildings. It used to be the case that you could get the local Fire Service in and they could say yay or nay - and make recommendations for improvements. That's all gone, AIUI they are no longer allowed to express an opinion and it is up to each building owner/responsible person to do a risk assessment. Of course, few have the skills (or more importantly, qualifications) so it's become a nice little earner for consultancies to do this for you. And of course, many building owners are using them for no other reason that if it ends up in court they can say "but I employed a professional and he assessed as ...". The consultant may say nothing you don't already know, but it gives you someone to blame if it all goes tits-up.
Sad that we've arrived here already.
, and I'd guess for domestics there'll be a catch-all in Part P. Outside of domestics and it'll be covered by things like the Electricity At Work regulations and all the general H&S regs etc.
