UK government urged to consider new national product safety agency

A parliamentary committee made the recommendations in a new report on the safety of electrical goods in the UK. Its inquiry on the matter was prompted, in part, by the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in June last year. It is thought that a faulty fridge caused the fire, which killed 71 people. A number of other major fires have also been attributed to faults with electrical items.

In its report, which singled out manufacturer Whirlpool for criticism over its response to concerns raised about faulty tumble dryers, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee bemoaned the "fragmented" nature of the UK's product safety regime. It said "several bodies" play a role in providing advice or overseeing compliance and said there is reliance on under-resourced local Trading Standards teams for enforcement of product safety law. It also criticised the lack of a "systemic approach to recording and analysing incidents related to defective products" in the UK.

In 2014 the UK government commissioned an independent review of the UK’s system for the recall of unsafe products. The review, led by former 'Watchdog' presenter Lynn Faulds Wood, reported in February 2016 and made a series of recommendations for improvement.

However, the BEIS Committee was critical of the "painfully slow" progress towards "improving the safety of electrical goods" and expressed its disappointment at the government's failure to implement recommendations from the Faulds Wood review. It called on the government to publish "a full response" to that review before the end of February this year.

It said the case for a new national product safety agency should also be more closely examined by the government.

"We have not explored in detail all the arguments relating to the establishment of a national product safety agency but it seems on the surface a sensible way to address generic safety issues, particularly given the uncoordinated and fragmented nature of existing arrangements," the BEIS Committee said in its report. "We recommend that the government carries out and publishes a cost benefit analysis of the options for reallocating and concentrating existing resources, both centrally and locally, with a view to combining into a single national product safety agency."

The Committee also said that "serious consideration" should be given to the introduction of a new "single portal" to enable consumers to "access comprehensive information" on the recall of white electrical goods and where they can also "register their products". Further measures to improve traceability were also proposed in the report.

"The government should also explore introducing automatic registration of white goods at point of sale," the BEIS Committee said. "More widely, the government should look at how to reach customers with unsafe goods across other product ranges, such as small electrical goods, clothing and lower value items. We believe these steps would significantly reduce the risk recalled products pose and would represent a major benefit for consumer awareness."

Specialist in product liability and recall issues Andrew Masterson of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that any show of energy towards stronger monitoring and enforcement of product safety is to be welcomed.

"A central enforcement body with a remit to handle higher risk general products is an attractive concept," Masterson said. "Some specialist riskier product types like medicines, vehicles and food already have centralised enforcement. However for general products, including electricals, enforcement is spread across local authorities who generally lack the product safety experience and man power to be pro-active. However, any expectation of 'centralising' resources from local authorities is likely to be optimistic given existing resource stretch."

Masterson said, though, that "an easy win" would be to improve "traceability of products to the point of use".

"This has long been a cause of lamentably low response levels to safety recall programmes and it is certainly time to address this through integrated data collection at the point of sale," Masterson said. "Data collection would effectively be outsourced to retailers who often have systems to collect contact details for marketing reasons already."  

In October 2016, the UK government announced that a cross-stakeholder working group had been set up to help identify improvements that could be made to the safety of white goods. One of the areas of focus for the group, which comprised representatives from the fire service, trading standards, consumer groups and industry, was "a code of practice for product recalls, including the peer review of risk assessments", the Department for BEIS said at the time.