Valery, First the rules on -ize. The original rule of the OED was that there was no choice if the word had a Greek route. It had, in such cases to be -ize. Alas, no one learns Greek any more, so no one knew how to apply the rule, and, as English language is a living organism, they changed their thinking so that the situation is now this. Where there is a choice, you can, as you say, use either, BUT the OED preferred spelling is the -ize version. You will find all the many thousands of British Standards that your civil service chums quote endlessly (often with little care -and sometimes understanding-of what the documents say in the first place) are all written solely with -ize endings, because BS 0 (a standard for standards) says you must use the OED style.
The decriminalization of minor breaches was a concept that your chums bandied about, in the heady days of Vicki Harris and Gerry Reid, in respect of the WFPL. The theory made perfect sense, and it was this. If you breach ANY condition specified in a fire certificate, you are committing an offence, for which you could be subject to prosecution, namely that of breaching a condition specified in a fire certifcate. This can be an entirely trivial breach, such as failing to keep a log book. But then you really have no excuse, as your friendly neighbourhood I/O has spent lots of his valuable time telling you exactly what to do via the medium of the fire certificate. Now along comes FRA and the WFPL, and suddenly the poor punter is cast adrift from his friendly I/O (like good ole Messey), who will no longer be holding his hand and sorting out his fire precautions for him. It was acknowledged that the poor punter will not get it as right as Messey (though he might do as well as CERTAIN of Messey's chums). so the idea was, if he gets it wrong, lets not give power to prosecute them for an offence UNLESS he is so damn stupid that he puts people at serious risk. What you now have in the RRO is just that principle carried over into the RRO, with less scope for defence if you put an employee (as opposed to a non-employee) at serious risk. As I recall, the 1993 Home Office report on the FP Act first introduced the concept, but I do not recall that it used the funny term decriminalization, but it said the same thing, and that was the term that people used for a while during the drafting of the WFPL.
On a personal note, try not to understand all this too well, as civil service policy is to move people to other Departments as soon as they know anything about the subject with which they are dealing, and we would all kind of miss you if that happened. You might end up fixing the gypsies, like Wee Marky Coram. ( Have any of them put a shotgun up his sit-upon yet, do you happen to know?)
