I don't think that is a necessarily true statement. I would need to see the cord.

Given how horrible reporters are at getting tech and science right, I don't assume "frayed cord" in the article translates to the technical meaning of the term.

That being said, this argument seems to largely consist of 1) some people who assume the repair-man is incompetent and possibly has a psycopathic desire to kill people via shoddy repairs, and at the same time assuming the technical descriptions are 100% accurate, and 2) some people who assume the reporter was being a reporter and willfully being incompetent in reporting, while the humble repairman (basically a hacker working on items) is good enough to know what he is doing with extremely reasonable margins of safety.

Neither of these sets of assumptions particularly valid and they appear to stem from deeper assumptions: what is an acceptable margin of risk, what value various safety rules have on actual safety and so on. IMHO, discussions on these would be far more interesting than wrangling about a passage from a single report without any other evidence of what was (not) done.

I am amazed that anyone thinks this is some kind of over-protective nannying, or expensive over-engineering.

When you have a 2000 watt device operating on 220 v ac mains you can't afford to bodge safety critical components.

Irons are not double insulated (they have a huge chunk of metal on the base) and thus you need to be really careful with earthing and mains cords. This is especially true in a device that needs water to operate.

Since 1.5 metres of good quality mains flex costs hardly anything, and they have have the iron open anyway, there's little reason not to replace the flex. You replace the mains plug at the same time, thus avoiding another common source of risk.

You mention the potential for safety standards to be over-protective and over engineered. I gently agree, some of them do seem a bit much. But then I remember when TV adverts warned people about mains-socket safety - about shoving the wires into the socket by using matches. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwmrBXHFO4)

All electrical appliances need to come with a pre-fitted plug in the UK. Perhaps the wiring coming from mass producing Chinese factories is scary, but so is the wiring I've seen many friends do (skimpy short earth leads and big loops of live leads) with over-tightened or loose screws - I've seen many nasty errors.

Well, if the issue is a frayed cord, I agree, substitution, as you said, is cheap.

But of course you could describe a cord as "frayed" but only because it's a little dirty, but the isolation is still in good shape

I like that the PSA ends with "fix things properly", which is sensible, as opposed to "don't fix electronic appliances"

It can go a bit too much the other way. A lab full of PhD physicists and engineers designing and building an advanced radar sat and we can't get an extension cord. Instead we get the extension block and a separate plug and wire.

We then need an maintenance 'engineer' who has been on the half day PAT course to come and fit the cable for us.