My Lords, this amendment is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Stevenson. It addresses a serious, indeed often fatal, weakness in consumer protection. When a dangerous fault occurs in an electrical product, there is no adequate mechanism whereby other owners of that same dangerous product are notified of the need to exchange it. The amendment therefore requires manufacturers to inform enforcement authorities about the number of consumers affected and the extent of damage and injury that has been caused. It also requires the Secretary of State to publish information on dangerous products.
It is estimated that approximately 40 to 45 deaths a year are caused by faulty appliances. Although there is a system for recalling dangerous products, it is deeply flawed because of the difficulties of alerting consumers who bought such faulty products and because of 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 arising either from fire, electrocution or carbon monoxide poisoning. Indeed, probably more than 1 million faulty products are still in people’s homes.
The problem is that manufacturers currently have no legal obligation to declare how many such dangerous applications are in circulation. Furthermore, once a manufacture becomes aware of faults, there is no specified timeframe within which they have to act to have others recalled. Some manufacturers have taken years to take action after accidents caused by their appliances. The BIS guidelines are that recall should be expected as soon as the manufacturer becomes aware of the problem, but that is not specific enough. Even more important, perhaps, it is not mandatory. Sadly we see preventable deaths occurring because of failings in the recall system.
I spoke in Committee about the case of Santosh Benjamin-Muthiah, a 36 year-old father of two who was killed in 2010 by a fire caused by a fridge freezer that had been recalled. The manufacturer had been aware of the fault three years earlier but failed to issue a safety notice until 2011—in other words, a year after the death of Santosh Benjamin-Muthiah. By that time, half a million defective fridge-freezers had been sold. Even two years after the recall started, there were probably 100,000 still unidentified in people’s homes.
In another case, Beko was fined £76,600 for failing to inform trading standards of a serious risk posed by some of its cookers. Despite being aware of the fault in 2009, Beko notified trading standards only in 2013.
Hotpoint recalled dishwashers with a fire risk a whole year after Which? had raised concerns about them. So there are problems of late starting but, even once something starts, the average success rate for product recalls is only between 10% and 20%.
The current voluntary and slightly haphazard approach is clearly not working. On the one hand, manufacturers fail to recall—due either to cost or to worries about reputational risk, in which case sanctions are inadequate. On the other, despite the producers’ best efforts, current practice is dangerously inadequate, leaving thousands of faulty products in circulation.
In Committee, we asked the Government how many cases of preventable deaths were documented. The Minister responded by letter, saying that she was unable to provide the number of fatal injuries caused by unsafe electrical appliances. However, the DCLG fire statistics do have the data, which show that there were more than 16,000 fires a year caused by faulty products, leading to 15 deaths and nearly 800 injuries. Electrical Safety First’s research into consumer attitudes towards product recalls demonstrated a strong appetite for change. Its report, Consumer Voices on Product Recall, found that a quarter of people thought there was already a central repository of all recall information. So the website called for in our amendment would create what many consumers assume already exists.
Only one-third of consumers always fill in the registration form down at the bottom of the packet when they buy electrical products—we have all seen it there. Six out of 10 say they would be more likely to fill it in if reassured that the information would not be used for commercial gain. Only an independent database, as proposed in our amendment, would deliver this peace of mind. An industry-led list would not encourage people to register, because they would believe that their details would be used for marketing. Of 17 registration forms analysed, only one mentioned safety as a benefit of registration—so it is no wonder people do not think they want to sign up. It is simply not the manufacturers’ priority and it will not become their priority until legislation compels them to take action. Peter Dartford, President of the Chief Fire Officers Association, said:
“The reality is that it is the manufacturers who have created these risks and it is their moral and legal responsibility to ensure these risks are eradicated from homes”.
At the inquest into the death of Mr Benjamin-Muthiah, the coroner called for the creation of a simple, easy to use, government-funded or national website where all faulty products could be registered and accessed by consumers and retailers. He called also for increases in the fines for manufacturers who failed to notify and the creation of a code of practice on product recalls. Our amendment would strengthen consumer protection in line with the views of the coroner, of consumers and of the fire officers, to say nothing of the views of the families of those who have died needlessly. I beg to move.