BRITAIN’S half-hearted conversion to metric weights and measures is a “very British mess” which urgently needs to be simplified, a report said yesterday.

Campaigners have called on the Government to banish the pint, mile, gallon, yard, Fahrenheit, acre and stone by 2009, claiming that use of these old units is damaging to British companies’ competitiveness and is confusing consumers.

The Metric Association, which produced the report, blamed the media for fuelling the public’s reluctance to give up imperial measurements. The result has been a conversion process which got “stuck halfway through”.

In his foreword to the report, Lord Howe of Aberavon, said that the first Thatcher Government, of which he was a member, had been “foolish” to apply the brakes to the conversion in 1979. The result was a dual system which was unsustainable, he said. The report called on the Government to obey the edict in the Magna Carta which says there should be “one measure of wine throughout our whole realm . . . and one measure of corn . . . and one width of cloth”.

The report attempts to sever the link between metrication and the European Union, with Lord Howe emphasising that a Commons committee unanimously recommended the adoption of the metric system as early as 1862.

The report also attempts to reclaim the issue from the Right, which has long championed the imperial cause. The association accused the media of being “a major obstacle to completion of the metric changeover”, and noted the “vigorously pro-imperial and anti-metric attitudes in most tabloids”.

“Opponents of change have been able to exploit fears of the unknown and misrepresent metrication as though it were a foreign imposition. The reform has therefore stalled.”

The report adds: “The United Kingdom is the only significant country in the world (apart from the USA) which has begun and then failed to carry through a metric conversion programme.”

It highlights 15 “serious problems” with the dual system. These include:

• Increased costs for manufacturers and retailers involved in dual pricing on signs and packaging, and the confusion this causes for customers
  
  
• Misunderstandings, including the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter space probe in 1999 which cost £100 million, “because a subcontractor failed to use metric”
  
  
• People using metric at work having to adjust to an imperial environment outside work
  
  
• Difficulties for people calculating their body mass index
  
  The report singled out football commentators for criticism, because they refer to the “six-yard box”. But they endorsed athletics, swimming and rugby union for using metres and kilometres.
  
  The report did allow one concession: “Traditional expressions and literary quotations such as ‘pound of flesh’ will not change.”
  
  The mistrust of the metric system dates to 1791, when the British Government declined France’s invitation to join in establishing an international system devised by the Paris Academy of Sciences. It took until 1897 for Parliament to legalise the use of metric measures in trade and commerce.
  
  KEY TO CONVERSIONS
  
  1 mile 1.6093 km
  
  1 yard 0.9144 metres
  
  1 foot 03048 metres
  
  1 inch 2.54 cm
  
  1 gallon 4.546 litres
  
  1 pint 0.568 litres
  
  1 stone 6.3503 kilograms
  
  Fahrenheit to Celsius Subtract 32 and divide by 1.8

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