This was the headline in one newspaper yesterday in what is certainly by far the biggest weights and measures story there has been in this country for a decade, apart from the 'Metric Martyrs' saga and the activities of ARM.

Here are some verbatim extracts from the newspaper article, which covered the issue of a report by Government spending watchdog the National Audit Office yesterday:

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"A short measures rip-off on everything from a pint of beer to a litre of petrol and a bunch of bananas is costing Britons hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

"Shoppers are not getting what they pay for, says the National Audit Office, because as many as one in five weighing machines and petrol pumps is faulty or rigged.

"A fifth of pre-packaged goods also does not contain the amount of fruit and vegetables, cooked meat or other products stated on the label, according to the NAO's latest report.

"The scam is worth...£250 million a year at retail prices.

"Motorists are also being systematically cheated. The volume of petrol changes according to temperature, which means the amount paid by garages or drivers to the oil companies may not accurately match the quantity they are getting.

"In many cases, the short measure is a rip-off rather than a simple technical error, the report claims.

"A coal merchant in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, used a hollowed-out 25 kg weight which meant coal bags contained only 23.5 kg.

"A customer from Essex ordered three cubic metres of topsoil from a local garden centre. But trading standards officers discovered that only 1.92 cubic metres had been delivered, a shortfall of 36%.

"Chris Howell, weights and measures expert for the Trading Standards Institute, said: 'The level of inspections on weights and measures is not what it should be. That is all down to resources for local authorities. They don't have the manpower and the money to do the job. I don't want to create the impression that every butcher is giving short weight, but where there are no checks, people take advantage'".

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Chris Howell, of course, was a key government enforcer of the hated compulsory metrication regulations that came in on 1 January 2000. Indeed, it was a quote from him that gave rise to the phrase 'metric martyr'. Howell was was quoted on 9 November 1999 by the 'Daily Telegraph' as saying: "If people are thinking of defying the law and becoming martyrs, they will find they have a heavy price to pay".

How ironic, then, that Howell should now bemoan the 'lack of resources' of Trading Standards Departments.

In economics, there is a frequently-used concept called 'opportunity cost'. It refers to the 'lost opportunity' that occurs whenever you decide to spend money on one thing rather than another.

To take two examples. A governent might decide to spend £2 billion extra next year on increasing state pensions above the rate of inflation. But it could instead have improved the transport infrastructure of the country. Or a business might decide to pay a dividend of £500,000 to its shareholders. But by doing so, it has failed to invest in some modernising equipment.

There was a truly massive 'opportunity cost' of compulsory metrication. Consider all the following time, effort and money that has been spent over the past four years or so on compulsory metrication:

* devising new legislation and getting it through Parliament

* a massive publicity campaign, with leaflets and vists by TSO's to hundreds of thousands of businesses over the U.K.

* the spending of millions of pounds by businesses on converting their perfectly sound weighing machines into metric units, or buying entirely new machines

* widespread training needed for TSOs in the new Regulations, training in the new measurements which was needed by tens of thousands of retail staff

* enforcement of the new Regulations after 1 January 2000, with tens of thousands of enforcement notices, visits by TSOs, letters to 'rebel' traders, legal action in the courts etc.

Now, suppose we could have avoided that. Suppose we had decided not to do what Brussels told us back in 1980 we must do. Suppose instead the professional weights and measures institutions in this country had decided to serve people's *real* interests by planning a nationwide campaign against 'short measure' - and had used all the resources wasted on compulsory metrication to eradicate 'short measure' instead of trying to eradicate British weights and measures.

Well, yesterday's National Audit Office report would have turned out very different...

"* a massive publicity campaign, with leaflets and vists by TSO's to hundreds of thousands of businesses over the U.K."

If only. What massive publicity campaign? Businesses may have been given information but the public were not at least not on the scale or high profile it should have been. Market traders have been unfairly left to educate their customers about buying food in kg, a job that the Government should have done long ago.

<<Market traders have been unfairly left to educate their customers about buying food in kg, a job that the Government should have done long ago.>>


How exactly does one "educate" someone about buying food in kg? Did anyone ever educate you about buying food in lbs.? If so, who and when?

As it happens I was brought up on the imperial system having learnt it at school when they were the primary units of measure being taught, like metric is now.

So I already knew about the lb which was a unit of trade that been in use for a long time. I therefore had the benefit at that time of shopping in units I had been taught before-hand.

When the metric system was introduced into the retail market many adult shoppers were unfamiliar with it and had not been taught it at school. It was a fundamental change and people needed and still need help with it.

The Governments should have handled it in much the same way they did back in the late 1960s before the change to decimal coinage. A huge campaign of public education was carried out with result that people were able to adapt to it very quickly.