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The Press: EU rules ban the DIY electricians
Householders are to be banned from carrying out many simple electrical jobs at home. EU rules aimed at cutting down on injuries mean a registered electrician will have to carry on work in the bathroom, kitchen or garden - areas exposed to water where accidents are deemed more likely… The new regulations come into force on New Year’s Day under an edict from the EU’s Committee for the Normalisation of Electrotechnology.
(Daily Mail, 29 November 2004, page 27)

The Facts:

This “edict” is actually a set of voluntary standards adopted by the European Committee for Electrical Standardization, a non-EU body, made up of organisations from 28 European countries, including the British Standards Institution. It is a matter for national governments if they wish to legislate to enforce such standards.

Notes: I can only defer to the to those who literally wrote the book on the subject

This is not true. It is a lie. As we pointed out on this Blog, what in fact is going on is a poorly understood and little-advertised procedure whereby the EU is gradually harmonising technical laws in the Community, first introduced in 1983 and then amended in 1998 by an extraordinarily opaque directive (98/34/EC) “laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical standards and regulations”.

What this Directive did was introduce what has been called the “new approach” to technical harmonisation.

The process was to continue to work through the EU standardisation bodies such as CEN and CENELEC, which would continue to churn out “European standards” but, instead of these then being turned into EU directives and regulations, this new directive required the various national standardisation bodies (such as the British Standards Institute) to confer “the status of a national standard to these standards” and “to withdraw any conflicting national standards.”