As you can probably tell from my last post legislative compliance is a bit of a sore point. As part of my job I complete at least two customer questionnaires every week, in order that the customer can maintain one accreditation or another. These invariably contain questions with regards to how my employer ensures the legislative compliance of the products we produce, and some form of warranty statement for me to sign. The warranties normally cite a range of legislation with which we should comply, and as an estimate I would say that over 80% of these warranties cite revoked and, or amended legislation. My invariable response is to write on the warranty something to the effect that we are unable comply and sign because the legislation listed is out of date due to amendment and or revocation. In ten years of doing this, not once has a customer come back with an amended warranty or questioned my response, which makes me wonder as to their own legislative compliance systems.
Following my previous post and by way of a quick survey, I scanned a dozen UK kite club sites, excluding the KSGB and the BKFA, as to whether they listed any kite flying legislation with the following result:
- 1 site cited the correct base legislation but not the amendments.
- 1 site cited the same outdated legislation as the KSGB.
- 2 sites referred to the one citing the outdated legislation.
- 2 sites had safe flying pages which outlined the requirements of the legislation but did not cite it.
- The remaining 6 sites neither cited the legislation nor outlined any safe flying guidlines.
If you are going to cite something, particularly legislation, were a person’s freedom maybe at stake, one should ensure that it is always up to date. In my opinion it is better not to cite legislation than to cite out of date legislation.