I think UK is sometimes obsessed with Health and Safety regulations preventing you from using or doing things which have been considered normal in the past. To 5 year lifespan regulator, it reminds me Industrial lifespan for most of the things produced only for the sake of business turnover and innovation. (Industrial disk storage, Servers etc have lifespan 5-6 years, while consumer Chinese tat 1 to 3 years). You can apply this logic to every product produced today and this behavior started around 1930 when consumerism was born. (google document century of the self).
Little off original thread subject but people deserve to know so they are not fleeced by corporate machine.