British Standards are produced by BSI British Standards, a division of BSI Group that is incorporated under a Royal Charter and is formally designated as the National Standards Body (NSB) for the UK.
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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 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 a sponsored piece of work allowing organizations flexibility in the rapid creation of a standard while also allowing for a greater degree of control over the document's development. A typical development time frame 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.
Copies of British Standards are sold by BSI Business Information [4]. 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.[2] 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[3]. The BSI Library in Chiswick charges visiting members of the public a fee of £10 per hour (contact the Library in advance of the visit on +44 (0)20 8996 7004 or library@bsigroup.com). This service is free to BSI members, students and accredited journalists [4].
