Should the UK copy Europe on standardised chargers?

You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce?

It was this frustration, together with the wastage which arises when old chargers are thrown away purely because they won’t fit a charging port, which led the EU to announce in 2022 that phone companies will have to use a common charging cable: the USB type C port. Apple protested that iPhones would no longer be allowed to use their own unique charging sockets, but relented. The changes are due to come in from 28 December this year.

In its crusade to standardise chargers, though, the EU has set post-Brexit Britain one of its first big challenges over product standards.