Could we set the latest-year value programmatically when we generate a new std_names.py ?
It would also be a good idea to embed the active release version of iris-code-generators itself (when we've defined one).

Another very handy traceability item would be to embed the CF table revision from the source the XML.
But that is outside the scope here -- I created an extra issue :  https://github.com/SciTools/iris-code-generators/issues/2