if a club was to build a safe standing area in a new ground would they be denied a safety certificate or would the authorities see it as safe?

I assume the answer is...

Championship + Premiership - No certificate for you you stupid people. Who do you think we are a moron agency. Everyone must sit down or there will be total chaos.

League 1 and below - Who gives a trout, here you go. However, be warned, for if you dare to enter the scary heights of the championship, all your fans will die unless you convert your standing area into a seated one. Oh, ok we'll give you 3 years...

I'm in such a strange mood today!!!

I assumed he meant seating/standing areas like they have in Germany. Where there are seats but barriers too.

Like this:-

I can't see a reason why if a club were to build a German style convertable seat / terrace area, but lock the seats into seated position (until the regulation is changed), this shouldn't be allowed. However I suspect the FLA would try very hard to find a reason to block a safety certificate.

Maybe this is something to explore at a sympathetic club who has to go all seated due to the 3 year rule, or who is building a new ground.

I imagine that once a club has actually gone ahead and installed the sitting/standing facility in one section it would still be regarded as all-seater untill the day the regulation changes, however even if one club publically supported such a move and announced its intentions to provide this facility that would be a massive boost to us and fans in generall. However to get that far we must keep pushing our clubs.

Even if seats were locked down I think you'd still have the problem of fans standing on seats. At Bradford there a few lads right at the back that do this on a regular basis.

The German model with a bar between each row is, if anything, much "safer" than the arrangement we have now, with people going over rows of seats during goal celebrations etc. Also, it blows all the "polis not being able to pick out hooligans" nonsense out of the water, seeing as there is less freedom of movement for anyone trying to get involved in (non-existent) rucks inside grounds, hide themselves from surveillance cameras in a big surging mob, etc.

Of course we know that modern terracing like that seen at newer non-league grounds is perfectly safe and has little if any effect on crowd trouble (in Germany they mostly put the home terracing up one end and the away terracing in between blocks of away seating up the other, but that would make far too much sense for England) but our first objective should be to push the configuration seen in the pic above, as it really does leave nothing to chance with crowd safety/control.

How can the FLA go on obsessively about 1/20,000;1/30000 injuries a game and all that skewed crap when there is an option that would make grounds "even" safer? They really do have nothing left to fight with if confronted by the bar-between-the-rows configuration, even if it wouldn't be quite as enjoyable as an actual terrace.