Don't talk to me about council's head electricians !!!
Some years ago, our council declared our area a General Improvement Area & offered private homeowners a grant to improve their properties. Such improvements included new guttering, new garden walls, fences gates etc. & as my house was in need of new gutters, a new front garden wall & a new back gate I applied.
The next thing was we had a visit from their inspector who agreed that we could be elligible for this grant, subject to a satisfactory report from their Electrical Inspector. No problem I thought, as I had only recently completed rewiring the place.
The Inspector arrived a few days later when I was at work & he left my wife with a report in which he condemned the installation on the grounds that it didn't comply with th council's rules & regulations !!! He was kind enough to leave us with a copy of said regulations, which were based on the 15th edition (which I had worked to) but with a lot of other silly stuff added. Wife said that he had hinted that if we "greased his palm" everything would be ok & we would get our grant, other wise "the whole lot will have to be ripped-out & done again".
Wife's parents lived up the road in a council house which had just been renovated & that included a complete rewire, so off I went to inspect their installation & was horrified to find that many of the old fittings - some of which were broken & held together with insulating tape - were still in use. Further investigation revealed cables under the floor running in notched joists which according to the council's own regs. wasn't permitted, and cbles literally wrapped around central heating pipes, when their regs. clearly stated that they should not even be in the same void !!
So, armed with a neatly writen list of my findings, I presented myself in the Head Electrician's office which wasn't much more than a janitor's cupboard literally under the stairs of the Town Hall. I presented him with my findings & told him in no uncertain terms that if I didn't get my grant, I would see to it that he wouldn't have his job for much longer !!!
I got my grant.