Installing a new consumer unit

There are some backboards that have the words “Board equipment only” on them. There are some that don’t.
Back in the day the backboard, supply, cutout and meter were supplied by one entity: the “Electricity Board”

That’s not the case any more.
These days 'they' expect the developer to provide the backboard and run the main cable in new builds.
 
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Precisely.
I have known a situation where a backboard was provided by the builder in a plant room containing various electrical items, including a 4 pole isolator and tails ready to go into meter, space had been allocated on the board for meter and cut out. They also laid in a cable from the nominated location inside the boundary to the plantroom.

DNO arrived and started saying every thing had to be removed from the backboard, builder told him to put his own f****** back board up, DNO provided one from the van and builder screwed it on the existing.
 
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I seem to remember the DNO was to provide an isolator, which they rarely did, so electricians treated the main fuse as an isolator. Although a negative times a negative is a positive, two wrongs do not make a right, but not seen any court case for an electrician drawing the fuse. For home owner yes, clearly electricity theft, but not seen an electrician taken to court.

Maybe I am wrong?
 
From the late 80s, I was given permission to cut seals and pull fuses on Norweb's cutouts and meters in order to do a board change.

I would then leave a completion cert and ring Norweb. They would then come after me, collect the cert and seal up.

Very handy.
 
For home owner yes, clearly electricity theft, but not seen an electrician taken to court.

Removing the fuse from the cut out is not electricity theft (*), abstraction requires that additional methods are used that enable electricity to be used with the meter registering that use.


(*) more accurately abstracting electricity, is a statutory offence of dishonestly using, wasting, or diverting electricity,
 

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