British Standards are the standards produced by BSI Group which is incorporated under a Royal Charter (and which is formally designated as the National Standards Body (NSB) for the UK). The BSI Group produces British Standards under the authority of the Charter, which lays down as one of the BSI's objectives to:

(2) Set up standards of quality for goods and services, and prepare and promote the general adoption of British Standards and schedules in connection therewith and from time to time to revise, alter and amend such standards and schedules as experience and circumstances require

— BSI Royal Charter, Faller and Graham Formally, as per the 2002 Memorandum of Understanding between the BSI and the United Kingdom Government, British Standards are defined as:

"British Standards" means formal consensus standards as set out in BS 0-1 paragraph 3.2 and based upon the principles of standardisation recognised inter alia in European standardisation policy.

— MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN THE UNITED KINGDOM GOVERNMENT AND THE BRITISH STANDARDS INSTITUTION IN RESPECT OF ITS ACTIVITIES AS

THE UNITED KINGDOM'S NATIONAL STANDARDS BODY, United Kingdom Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills Products and services which BSI certifies as having met the requirements of specific standards within designated schemes are awarded the Kitemark.

How British Standards are made

The BSI Group as a whole does not produce British Standards, as standards work within the BSI is decentralized. The governing Board of BSI establishes a Standards Board. The Standards Board does little apart from setting up Sector Boards (a Sector in BSI parlance being a field of standardization such as ICT, Quality, Agriculture, Manufacturing, or Fire). Each Sector Board in turn constitutes several Technical Committees. It is the Technical Committees that, formally, approve a British Standard, which is then presented to the Secretary of the supervisory Sector Board for endorsement of the fact that the Technical Committee has indeed completed a task for which it was constituted.

The standards

The standards produced are titled British Standard XXXX[-P]:YYYY where XXXX is the number of the standard, P is the number of the part of the standard (where the standard is split into multiple parts) and YYYY is the year in which the standard came into effect. BSI Group currently has over 27,000 active standards. Products are commonly specified as meeting a particular British Standard, and in general this can be done without any certification or independent testing. The standard simply provides a shorthand way of claiming that certain specifications are met, while encouraging manufacturers to adhere to a common method for such a specification.

The Kitemark can be used to indicate certification by BSI, but only where a Kitemark scheme has been set up around a particular standard. It is mainly applicable to safety and quality management standards. There is a common misunderstanding that Kitemarks are necessary to prove compliance with any BS standard, but in general it is neither desirable nor possible that every standard be 'policed' in this way.

Following the move on harmonisation of the standard in Europe, some British Standards are gradually superseded or replaced by the relevant European Standards (EN).