I know you justify it against BS7671, something I have learnt in 30 years of testing. Any competent person is almost certainly going to give comparative Codes as suggested by this Guide but you are not required to give a reason if your opinion differs.
You are completely correct but seem to be missing the key point of the BPG#4 document.
You, and probably most of the contributors on this forum, would generate similar codes from following the basic requirements. If a client or NICEIC (or similar) inspector came to you can asked:
"Hi westward10, I see you gave a C1|2|3 code for this, can you tell me why?"
Then I would be willing to bet that you would be able to turn round and answer something along the lines of:
"Thank you for asking, Cardinal Fang, if you see here in BS7671 (latest edition) then clearly item XYZ of this installation is not in compliance with regulation ABC.D.E, this has a safety aspect so it must be coded as Cx and I have given it C1|2|3 because it presents a danger {now}|{for this simple fault scenario}|{for this unusual situation/combination of faults}"
No problem. But
you are not really the intended audience of the BPG, and it is intended to help raise safety overall by addressing a few issues:
- Inspectors lacking experience
- Business models of stupidly low "inspection" price, doing SFA, and aiming to make money on unnecessary remedial work and ripping off the clients, leading to less public trust in the industry as a whole
- Owners/landlords pressuring for a "satisfactory" outcome, leading to unsafe insulations being passed
None of the above should exist, but they do, and so the next best option is education of clients and tradespeople of what is typically required.
I suspect that a few folks have misread the BPG#4 as somehow implying their judgement of applying BS7671 is not as good as the guidance, so they need to do better, but my reading is the opposite. What I read is that
all coding need to be justifiable if asked, and it is important to read on from that to the point where it says "judgement as a competent person should not be unduly influenced by the person ordering the work" to see the
real concern here for an organisation that aims to improve safety. What the BPG#4 does is reduce the occasions when you might be asked for justification.