Setting the standard : The BSI
It can be hard to keep up with the standards available for building products, especially as they are frequently changing. In this column, Barry Hunt will throw some light on the standards used for specifying stone. He begins by visiting the website of the British Standards Institution.
Go to the British Standards Institution (BSI) website and type ‘Natural Stone’ into the search box of the standards section. When I did it I got 109 hits. Of these, 24 are different tests for stone prior to use, four are for tests on masonry units that incorporate stone, nine deal with requirements, three are specifications and 17 are guides or codes of practice.
Of the remaining 52 standards that appear, 13 are current drafts for comment and the rest are mostly superseded and withdrawn versions of current standards.
To buy all the current standards listed I believe you would need to fork out £6,512 – an average of £114.24 per standard.
Add concrete, brick, plaster, ceramics and you enter into the tens of thousands of pounds of standards required, something that is certainly beyond the small- to medium-sized builder.
As an expert, I often berate trades people for not having standards. But I also feel guilty about doing so when it is obvious that BSI’s pricing policy does not encourage the buying of standards by the average small contractor.
There are schemes to gain access to standards, but these are still very expensive, and even joining BSI to gain from the membership benefits and half-price standards leaves a large sum to pay to stay fully informed.
Architects and designers need to make sure they have all the current building guidance, so suddenly it is understandable why they charge so much.
Some standards are only a few pages long. Remove the cover, contents, introduction, references and other stock pages and the useful information contained in them runs to only two or three pages. It is not uncommon for the useful information in a British Standard to work out at £20 to £30 per page.
That is why guidance documents published by bodies such as Stone Federation, which may incorporate information from many relevant standards, prove to be such excellent value for money.
If you look to other countries for copies of European standards you might start to question UK pricing. I went to the website of AENOR, the Spanish equivalent of BSI, and found a copy of
EN 12326-2 was €40.30. In the UK it costs £170.
There is no obvious explanation for this that I can discern. The document has not been translated into English as it has been written by the different nationalities involved in its compilation. In any case, a one off cost of translation would not be very much. It is easy to think that this situation looks like profiteering by a monopoly and I can only hope it is one day referred to the Competition Commission.
I wish BSI could adopt a pricing policy similar to that of Historic Scotland, which decided a few years ago to offer many of its technical advice documents at an affordable low flat rate so they would be widely used.
As a consequence, I bought about 50 relevant documents and a few not so relevant ones in one go rather than being very selective and using other people’s copies or the library.
Historic Scotland generated funds from me and many others, when otherwise it might not have received any funds at all.
I believe if BSI reduced the price of standards to affordable rates it would generate more funds from greatly increased sales.
Given that all standards are available as PDF downloads, such a policy should not have big printing cost implications. But I fear this is a gamble BSI will find impossible to take and the situation will continue to discourage smaller contractors from buying standards.
Over the next few issues I am going to briefly review the main specifications and codes of practice that are presently available for natural stone. I am going to rate them on the basis of the information they contain and their value for money.
I do not advocate not buying standards, as everyone involved in design or construction must have them. There are some standards you really cannot live without and can ultimately save you many thousands of pounds. But I hope to help you make an informed choice, because it is all too easy to make an expensive mistake and buy a standard you think you need but find is actually completely irrelevant.