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This item details in note form, aspects of maintenance relevant to the issues of life‐cycle costing discussed in the paper by David Hoar, which was published in the last issue of Property Management.

Reviews development in air conditioning from cave dwellers to the mid 1970s in the UK. Presents an overview of common air conditioning systems, with their relative merits. Concludes that air conditioning gives increased comfort levels and efficiency. Argues that the design of systems should be user‐led, rather than technology‐driven.

Reviews a series of building services with an emphasis on maintenance systems and policies. Discusses commissioning as the hinge between construction and use. Explores the evolution in maintenance thinking and the relationship between the building and those who occupy it. Examines reliability‐centred maintenance, including time as a basis of maintenance, posing seven questions which lie at the heart of policy setting, and a procedure for implementation. Outlines the design/commissioning/maintenance link, advocating the use of a database abstracted from litigation, and analysis of failed buildings as a basis for design.

Examines the equipment and skills necessary for the survey of building engineering services in existing buildings, and outlines their uses. Argues the necessity in a survey to extrapolate from the conditions found to those which will probably apply during the whole year, often in a very short space of time. Recommends the methods best used to achieve those ends.

This paper attempts to summarise the proceedings of a conference on sick buildings held on 22nd May, 1987. Although the conference was aimed initially at sick buildings syndrome it was extended by the speakers to cover all building related sickness, their causes, their avoidance, and the financial consequences. The conference was organised by Henry Stewart Conference Studies.

In the Court of Appeal last summer, when Van Den Berghs and Jurgens Limited (belonging to the Unilever giant organization) sought a reversal of the decision of the trial judge that their television advertisements of Stork margarine did not contravene Reg. 9, Margarine Regulations, 1967—an action which their Lordships described as fierce but friendly—there were some piercing criticisms by the Court on the phrasing of the Regulations, which was described as “ridiculous”, “illogical” and as “absurdities”. They also remarked upon the fact that from 1971 to 1975, after the Regulations became operative, and seven years from the date they were made, no complaint from enforcement authorities and officers or the organizations normally consulted during the making of such regulations were made, until the Butter Information Council, protecting the interests of the dairy trade and dairy producers, suggested the long‐standing advertisements of Reg. 9. An example of how the interests of descriptions and uses of the word “butter” infringements of Reg. 9. An example af how the interests of enforcement, consumer protection, &c, are not identical with trade interests, who see in legislation, accepted by the first, as injuring sections of the trade. (There is no evidence that the Butter Information Council was one of the organizations consulted by the MAFF before making the Regulations.) The Independant Broadcasting Authority on receiving the Council's complaint and obtaining legal advice, banned plaintiffs' advertisements and suggested they seek a declaration that the said advertisements did not infringe the Regulations. This they did and were refused such a declaration by the trial judge in the Chancery Division, whereupon they went to the Court of Appeal, and it was here, in the course of a very thorough and searching examination of the question and, in particular, the Margarine Regulations, that His Appellate Lordship made use of the critical phrases we have quoted.

IN order to be able to discriminate with certainty between butter and such margarine as is sold in England, it is necessary to carry out two or three elaborate and delicate chemical processes. But there has always been a craving by the public for some simple method of determining the genuineness of butter by means of which the necessary trouble could be dispensed with. It has been suggested that such easy detection would be possible if all margarine bought and sold in England were to be manufactured with some distinctive colouring added—light‐blue, for instance—or were to contain a small amount of phenolphthalein, so that the addition of a drop of a solution of caustic potash to a suspected sample would cause it to become pink if it were margarine, while nothing would occur if it were genuine butter. These methods, which have been put forward seriously, will be found on consideration to be unnecessary, and, indeed, absurd.