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Legislative Reform (Verification of Weighing and Measuring Equipment) Order 2008

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Legislative Reform (Verification of Weighing and Measuring Equipment) Order 2008. This draft order is about the verification of weighing and measuring equipment, and I should perhaps begin by explaining what that means. I was tempted to say that I was hoping to punch above my weight on this issue but then I thought that perhaps I would not. Weighing and measuring equipment that is used for trade has to be checked against the relevant statutory requirements at various stages in its life. This process is called verification, and it happens both before equipment is put into service and once it is in service, when it is subjected to any form of maintenance that could affect its accuracy. Equipment which passes the test is marked with a Crown stamp or other indication of its successful verification. The draft order before the Committee today is the final step in a process of reform of the law on verification that began more than 20 years ago. It also corrects, as I shall explain, what appears to have been a mistake in the drafting of the current law in 1999. In 1985 the Eden Committee on the Metrological Control of Equipment for Use for Trade concluded that manufacturers and repairers of weighing and measuring equipment should be able to verify equipment for themselves rather than have to rely on the services of hard-pressed local authority inspectors. Fourteen years later, after a number of further consultations and legislative false starts, the Deregulation (Weights and Measures) Order 1999 was made and came into force. It amended the Weights and Measures Act 1985 to permit the Secretary of State to approve manufacturers, installers and repairers of weighing and measuring equipment for the purposes of verifying equipment that they had themselves manufactured, installed or repaired. There had been some concern from Trading Standards, when the 1999 order was proposed, that approved verifiers would deliver a service that would in some sense be inferior to verification by inspectors. To meet that concern, it was agreed that approved verifiers would need to demonstrate that they followed specified quality assurance procedures and that their work would be closely monitored by accredited certification bodies and the National Weights and Measures Laboratory through a programme of audits and inspections. After the scheme had been operating for a couple of years, two things became very clear. First, approved verifiers were doing a very good job. Retailers—particularly petrol retailers, whose equipment is subject to quite frequent repair—were saving a fair amount of money in being able to use approved verifiers to both repair and verify equipment rather than having to call out inspectors to do the verification work every time their equipment needed repair. Secondly, although the system was working well, the 1999 order had missed a trick because, although it allowed manufacturers, installers and repairers of equipment to be approved for the purposes of verifying equipment that they had repaired, it did not allow them to be approved to verify equipment that they had adjusted. I hope that the Committee will stay with me on this. Members may be forgiven for wondering what the difference is between repair and adjustment. Briefly it is this. Repair is what engineers do when a petrol pump is mechanically broken or is not measuring within the prescribed legal limits of accuracy. Adjustment is what they do when the pump is not broken and is within the legal limits of accuracy but the retailer nevertheless wants to adjust it to measure more accurately still—in other words, to have as close to zero error as possible. As petrol pumps are adjusted quite frequently, it was a significant restriction on the usefulness of approved verifiers that they could not verify after adjustment, meaning that retailers still had to involve an inspector whenever their equipment was adjusted. In 2003 a committee of interested experts concluded that, in terms of the technical competences involved, anyone suitably qualified and equipped to verify after repair should be equally capable of verifying after adjustment. In 2005, there was a consultation under the regulatory reform Act on extending the approved verifier scheme to permit self-verification after adjustment. Overall, consultees were in favour of these. Some were not—namely, a minority of local authorities worried that the potential loss of income would make it difficult for them to continue to offer the service—so the National Weights and Measures Laboratory has worked very closely with them over the past year or two to resolve any outstanding concerns that they had. There is now no reason for any further delay in carrying out the deregulation of verification, which was recommended in 1985 and began in practice in 1999, to its logical conclusion. The draft order does that by adding a reference to adjustment to Section 11A of the Weights and Measures Act 1985. This would enable the Secretary of State to approve suitably qualified manufacturers, installers and repairers to verify equipment that they had adjusted. The committees, both here and in another place, have found that the order meets the preconditions laid down in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 by removing the need for retailers to engage inspectors where they had used approved verifiers to adjust their equipment. This order should lead to annual savings of £615,000 for an industry in which the majority of outlets—up to 7,500—are still owned or operated by small or medium-sized businesses. As well as assisting them financially, the order, by making it cheaper and easier to adjust equipment more often, will enable them to keep more accurate records of their stock and so detect environmentally harmful leaks more quickly. This final piece of verification reform is long overdue. It poses no risk to consumers and it will make life significantly easier for business.