This admission of metric confusion in the building industry was made in his column on 4th April 2004 by Jeff Howell, a pro-metric builder who writes a regular column in the 'Sunday Telegraph' in which he uses only metric units:

"Most European countries use metres and centimetres, but the British building industry measures everything in millimetres, thus doing away with the potential confusion of decimal points (for example, 25mm rather than 2.5cm). On construction drawings you will also often find that the comma after thousands and the 'mm' after all measurements are omitted. So a town house is 5500 wide, a door opening is 2100 high, and a kitchen worktop is 600 deep".

The problem is that Britain's construction industry adopted SI whereas other countries use an older version of metric.

It seems that Tony is trying to add Spin Doctor to his list of "talents".

The sentence quoted is not "an admission of metric confusion". It merely explains why UK practice differs slightly to that of other European countries in order to AVOID a POTENTIAL confusion.

Just to fill in anyone who doesn't read the Sunday Telegraph, Jeff Howell's column of 4th April 2004 was entitled "GO METRIC FOR GOOD MEASURE".

A more representative quote from the article can be seen below:

"As well as offering the advantage of global standardisation, metric measurements are less prone to errors. I once employed a carpenter who insisted on working only in feet and inches, which I think he intended as some kind of political statement. Unfortunately his numeracy and tape reading skills weren't up to it, and he was forever getting his seven-eighths mixed up with his fifteen-sixteenths. Millimetres would have made his life a lot easier, and kept him in a job."

When it comes to Tony's propaganda quotes this one really takes the biscuit!

The convention of mm only in the construction industry in the UK is due to the BSI not the SI.

It does have a certain logic as it avoids reliance on clarity of the decimal point or the variation in the symbol used for the point itself (comma v point). This is quite useful for drawings.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that mm precision tends to be used in situations where it is inappropriate.

To give an example where I encountered this recently. The office in which I work was assessed by a HSE representative. He criticised the desk layout for for a norrow exit to the main door. He quoted the regs as requiring a gangway of at least 600 mm.

A more user-friendly 60 cm would have been adequate.

A while ago someone was arguing on one of these boards that the imperial system (especially in the area of liquid volume measure) has too many needless units that are too close in magnitude to each other, causing confusion. Looks like this thread negates that argument.

heh, yes. Though why inches shouldn't be used I simply know not.

Re: Metric Confusion in the Building Industry April 14 2004, 11:18 PM


A while ago someone was arguing on one of these boards that the imperial system (especially in the area of liquid volume measure) has too many needless units that are too close in magnitude to each other, causing confusion. Looks like this thread negates that argument

You have mm,cm,m,km. Have you got problems differentiating between them?

You missed the point, metre.
Aim and shoot again.

Heh! Nice one!

Back to this bit, though:

"Millimetres would have made his life a lot easier, and kept him in a job."

I wonder if he was sacked as a political statement?

Re: Metric Confusion in the Building Industry April 15 2004, 7:35 AM


You missed the point, metre.
Aim and shoot again.

Show me how you prove your contention, then we talk about missing the point.

"stuck record" now springs to mind.

"I wonder if he was sacked as a political statement?"

It seems more likely that he would have got the sack for wasting timber
and/or producing poor work.

Still, you never know.

Trouble with that statement is that I've had work done on my house by people using imperial measures.
And they've always done a v good job.

But my alarm was put in by someone who measured the cable in metres (he kept saying it for some reason). And it failed.
Now I'm not suggesting that the work failed 'cos he said metric words


But yes, you never know


P.S. He took great delight in saying "we used over 300 metres of cable", and I turned to my girlfriend and said - "Blimey that's almost a thousand feet" - to which her face turned from blank to some surprise, having heard it in day 2 day measures.

Still - he obviously decided that I needed to know it in metres.

Erm - why?

He probably wanted to impress you with how much cable he'd used to get the job done and thus demostrate what value for money you were getting.

He'd know how many reels of cable had been used and since they're in metric it's easy to work out an approximate legnth in metres. Then, as likely as not, he wouldn't have thought to convert into feet because he's used to using metric for work. And as the person he was talking wasn't over 50 he'd assume that you would understand what he was going on about.