My Lords, Amendment 24, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Stevenson, addresses a very serious and sometimes fatal weakness in consumer protection for electricity safety: when there is a generic and dangerous fault in a particular model of electrical goods. There is no adequate mechanism whereby other owners of the same make and model are notified of the need to stop using it and exchange it.
The amendment therefore requires manufacturers to inform enforcement agencies of the number of consumers affected, and of the extent and type of damage and injuries that have been caused. It also requires the Secretary of State to publish information on dangerous products and to consult consumer groups when publishing their five-yearly report on consumer protection regulations.
This is an issue of great sadness, because it is very much about deaths and injuries. There are probably 40 or 45 deaths a year in domestic fires that have been caused by faulty appliances. Although there is a system for manufacturers to recall faulty products, it is very flawed because of the difficulties of alerting customers who have unwittingly bought such faulty products. It has also been undermined by unjustifiable delays on the part of some manufacturers in recalling products, even once they know them to be unsafe. Such cases relate to potentially fatal faults, such as risks of fire, electrocution or carbon monoxide poisoning.
It has been estimated that there are up to 2 million unsafe products in people’s homes. Manufacturers currently have no obligation to declare how many of those dangerous appliances are in circulation. Once manufacturers become aware of faults in their goods there is no specific timeframe in which they have to take action. In several instances, manufacturers have taken years to take action after a fatal accident caused by one of their appliances. Current BIS guidelines say that a recall is expected,
“as soon as the manufacturer becomes aware of a problem”.
That is not specific—more than that, it is not mandatory.
The Government do not feel that this should be mandatory; they want to continue with the voluntary approach. In the Commons, the Minister said that most—I emphasise, most—businesses take their customers’ safety seriously. I do not think that is good enough: “most industries” is not “all industries”. We have to safeguard consumers not from the good businesses but from those which do not take safety seriously.
Electrical Safety First detailed a particularly sad case of a preventable death that happened because of failures in the recall system—I am sure other noble Lords have received the same information. Mr Santosh Benjamin-Muthiah, a 36 year-old father of two, died in 2010 because of a fire in his home caused by a recalled fridge-freezer. The manufacturer had been aware of a fault with the defrost timer on that defective fridge-freezer three years before 2010, but did not issue a safety notice until 2011, by which time as many as half a million had been sold. In 2013—two years
after the recall had started—the manufacturer estimated that, although 190,000 had been repaired and 186,000 were scrapped, about 114,000 were still unidentified and still in someone’s home. The coroner at the quite recent inquest on Mr Benjamin will, I think, have written to the Chief Coroner rather than to the Government. However, he has written through his official channels calling for the creation of a simple, easy-to-use and government-funded all-national website where all products can be registered and accessed by consumers and retailers. He also called for increasing fines for manufacturers who fail to notify and for the creation of a code of practice on product recalls. The Chief Fire Officers Association has also called for manufacturers to take legal responsibility for eradicating risks caused by faulty appliances. Peter Dartford of the Chief Fire Officers Association has said:
“The reality is that it is the manufacturers who have created these risks and it is their moral and legal responsibility to ensure that these risks are eradicated from homes”.
Our amendment would strengthen consumer protection in line with the coroner’s recommendation and the fire officers’ views. Perhaps even more importantly, our amendment is in line with the views of the families, who have been quite needlessly bereaved of their loved ones. I beg to move.