Eg - I could start a market stall and advertise “Apples - 1 p per lb”. Some old biddy comes up and asks for a pound of apples. I weigh 1 apple and tell her “that will be £1 please”. She will obviously reply summat along the lines of, “There’s no way one apple can weigh 100 lb, there are about 4 apples in a pound”. To which I;d reply, “Ah, you’re talking about pounds avoirupois, I’m selling in pounds Rick (1 lb Rick = 1 gram)”. Wouldn’t take long for dual pricing to disappear and metric only to reign.

BTW, I went to my first ever Farmers’ Market at the weekend - 100% metric, not a per lb or per quarter sign anywhere.

I am pleased to see common-sense has finally prevailed.

It is yet another argument to show that whilst we have dual measures and try to legislate to accomodate both we will always have this kind of stupidity!

The same is the case for warehouse and land, in the latter case the estate agents signs will more often than not show acres rather than hectares. I’m fairly certain that, for instance, EU farm subsidies are given out by the hectare so it seems of little use to anybody to see advertising of this sort in imperial units!

It would seem reasonable to most people to believe that legislation of “weights and measures” would apply to anything to be traded by weight or measurement and that advertisement of goods, services, etc. would be covered by the same rules. British law however seems to have so many holes in it that this is not the case.

Both examples should be made illegal.

“The majority of commercial transactions in goods, land and services are not regulated by the Weights and Measures Act 1985. These transactions are therefore not subject to any express sanction under provisions in UK legislation that regulate the use of units of measurement.”

There was however the normal disclaimed advising any business that wished to use the DTI advice to seek legal opinion first. It seems that LACROS have done so and have decided that the DTI’s advice was incorrect.

Where then did the DTI go wrong, or did they go wrong? If one reads the DTI statement carefully, one will notice that it only makes reference to the Weights and Measures Act 1985. While it is true that the 1985 Act does not require that the size of a piece of land be stated when it is being advertised, bought, leased or sold it often happens that a piece of land is described in terms of its size or that rentals are determined using a formula that incorporates size. In such cases UK law has, since time immemorial, required that the measurements used do not misrepresent the land in question. The EC (now EU) directive catalogued the units that could be used and the European Communities Act 1972 gave a legal status to EC directives. I believe therefore that the DTI statement was not incorrect, but that the caveats were wide-ranging as to make the statement misleading.

It strikes me that the persistence of per square foot prices is because it appears less than the equivalent price per square metre. This is the same reason that some market traders like pounds rather than kilos. In contrast filling stations couldn’t wait to dump the gallon for the smaller litre.

The current mess illustrates the contempt our government and opposition have for consumer protection.