British Standards

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BSI Kite Mark Logo - Made up of the letters 'B' & 'S'
BSI Kite Mark Logo - Made up of the letters 'B' & 'S'

British Standards are produced by BSI British Standards, a division of BSI Group. It is incorporated under a Royal Charter and is formally designated as the National Standards Body (NSB) for the UK.

Contents

The standards produced are titled British Standard XXXX[-P]:YYYY where XXXX is the number of the standard, P is the number of the part of the standard (where the standard is split into multiple parts) and YYYY is the year in which the standard came into effect. British Standards currently has over 27,000 active standards. Products are commonly specified as meeting a particular British Standard, and in general this can be done without any certification or independent testing. The standard simply provides a shorthand way of claiming that certain specifications are met, while encouraging manufacturers to adhere to a common method for such a specification.

The Kitemark can be used to indicate certification by BSI, but only where a Kitemark scheme has been set up around a particular standard. It is mainly applicable to safety and quality management standards. There is a common misunderstanding that Kitemarks are necessary to prove compliance with any BS standard, but in general it is neither desirable nor possible that every standard be 'policed' in this way.

BSI Group began in 1901 as the Engineering Standards Committee, led by James Mansergh, to standardise the number and type of steel sections, in order to make British manufacturers more efficient and competitive.

Over time the standards developed to cover many aspects of tangible engineering, and then engineering methodologies including quality systems, safety and security.

BSI Group headquarter in Chiswick district in London.
BSI Group headquarter in Chiswick district in London.

The BSI also publishes a series of Publicly Available Specification (PAS) documents.

Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) are a flexible and rapid standards development model that is open to all organizations. A PAS is sponsored piece of work allowing organizations flexibility in the creation a rapid standard whilst also allowing for a greater degree of control over the document's development. A typical development timeframe for a PAS is around 6-9 months. Once published by BSI a PAS has all the functionality of a British Standard for the purposes of creating schemes such as management systems and product benchmarks as well as codes of practice. A PAS is a living document and after two years the document will be reviewed and a decision made with the client as to whether or not this should be taken forward to become a formal British standard.


  • BSI PAS 100 Composting specification
  • BSI PAS 101 Specification for recovered container glass
  • BSI PAS 102 Specification for processed glass for selected secondary end markets
  • BSI PAS 103 Specification for quality and guidance for good practice in collection and preparation for recycling
  • BSI PAS 104 Specification for quality and guidance for good practice for the supply of post consumer wood for consumption in the manufacture of panel board products
  • BSI PAS 105 Specification for paper waste

Copies of British Standards are sold by BSI Business Information [1]. They can also be ordered via the publishing units of many other national standards bodies (ANSI, DIN, etc.) and from several specialized suppliers of technical specifications.

Many British Standards (BS) – as well as some of the European and International Standards that were adopted as British Standards (BS EN, BS ISO) – are also available in public and university libraries in the United Kingdom, either on paper or online via a British Standards Online subscription. However, the BSI makes standards available to these libraries only under licence restrictions which forbid loan, inter-library loan, open-shelf access, and copying of more than 10% of a document by library users[citation needed]. The BSI library in Chiswick charges visiting members of the public a fee of £25 per half day although this is free to "members of the BSI, students & accredited journalists" [2].

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Standards"
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