My Lords, Amendment 3 is part of group 3, which focuses on the safety of marketed products; we are focusing now on safety. In a sense, the debate on the previous group of amendments demonstrated why the skeletal nature of the Bill needs flushing out. Alongside the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, and my noble friend Lord Foster, I hope we can investigate a little how we can flesh out the Bill on the subjects of health, safety and the environment.
Both Amendment 3 and Amendment 95, which is also in my name, seek to add some purpose to the Bill so that future regulations will be within the guard-rails we talked about earlier. Amendment 3 would simply insert safety as an objective for achievement for the regulations caused by the Bill. There are two purposes to this amendment: one is to try to ensure that, in future, the products regulated are safe, and the other is to allow the Minister to explain how reducing or mitigating risk works in the context of product safety. It seems to me that there is a glaring difference between the two, and I look forward to the Minister explaining how this legislation came to be written in this way.
Clause 1(4) goes on to define risk with language that implores the concept of safety, which is of course helpful. However, under the terms of Clause 1 as currently drafted, any danger to the health or safety of a person—or a domestic animal; the Minister knows that I am keen to know which animals are domestic and which are not, and why non-domestic animals should be subject to danger when domestic animals are not—needs only to be reduced, because Clause 1(1) comes before Clause 1(4). Surely the objective should be to eliminate risk.
If I was selling a trapeze kit for a seven year-old that was 30 feet from the ground, I could of course say that I had reduced the risk by including a mattress to put underneath it, but is this safe, and has sufficient mitigation been observed? I understand that there is no such thing as absolute safety. However, I contend that,
if the purpose of the Bill is, first and foremost, risk reduction or mitigation rather than safety, it is pitching the objective of regulations too low. I hope that is an understandable albeit rather complex explanation as to why I am moving this amendment.
Amendment 95 also focuses on safety. It simply spells out some considerations for future regulations made under the Act—namely, that they
“must have regard for consumer safety and wellbeing, and environmental sustainability”.
How could anybody object to those aspirations? Looking forward, we could leave it there and deal with the second part of this amendment in a different way. We will certainly come back to some of this in other groups but, at this point, I chose to add the specific issue of the disposal of chemicals and lithium-ion products because disposal is an important part of—
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