UK government has announced plans that could see a code of practice introduced that aims to govern the recall of major appliances such as washing machines, tumble dryers, fridge freezers and more in a bid to increase safety.
The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has now weighed in and said that a cross-stakeholder working group has 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 is “a code of practice for product recalls, including the peer review of risk assessments”, it said.
The group will also focus on seeking to identify “the causes of fires in white goods” and on how appliances can be marked in a way to make them “easier to identify after a fire”, BEIS said.
The group will comprise representatives from the fire service, trading standards, consumer groups and industry and is expected to make interim recommendations before the end of 2016.
And no, we’ve not been asked about taking part in this group presently nor, to our knowledge has the WTA or DASA been asked about this. Which seems kinda crazy since these are the guys on the front lines that see the products in people’s homes.
The group has been set up after it was concluded earlier this month that a major fire at a tower block in London in August, which 120 fire-fighters worked to extinguish, was caused by a tumble dryer which contained a fault that the manufacturer, Whirlpool, was aware of states reports.
Only that is inaccurate, Whirlpool did not make those tumble dryers at all, they were largely made by Hotpoint’s facility in Yate under the control of Indesit until Whirlpool bought the problem, along with Indesit, in mid-2014. Essentially inheriting what was clearly an ongoing issue.
The UK’s consumer minister Margot James has written to Whirlpool to seek “reassurance that everything possible is being done to ensure the safety of consumers and their families”, BEIS said.
Margot James has also asked for “the enforcement of product safety regulation” to be prioritised by local authorities.
She said that: “Manufacturers should be doing everything they can to make sure their products are safe to use and, where needed, rectifying issues as quickly as possible. This government takes consumer safety very seriously and I have offered to meet the managing director of Whirlpool to discuss how the company can improve its response to this issue.”
“I also want to see what more can be done to improve the safety of white goods and to support local trading standards officers to make sure customers aren’t put at risk,”.
London Fire Brigade said on Monday that there have been 2,072 fires in the city involving white goods since 2011 and that the fires have “cost the economy more than £118 million” over the period.
And all this is great but, if we take out the products that are improperly maintained and those that are improperly installed we’d wager and, be comfortable in doing so, that the number of these instances directly attributable to those two simple factors reduces those figures massively, if not rendering what remains to be almost insignificant statistically.
That said it is of course possible to make appliances safer as we have pointed out over the years, most recently in the article on lowering appliance safety but, it will come at a cost. What that cost will be depends on how far you want to go in terms of safety and, how much more people will pay for it given the already very low risk and how many manufacturers could actually do so is unknown.
The other huge factor is, how quickly could it be done given the replacement cycles on many large appliances is several years it would likely take many years before all had any new safety features that are introduced, which will not be of any assistance to machines that are already in the field.
As to a code of practice sure, it’s a great idea but how would it be enforced?
We’ve seen manufacturers flagrantly ignore the labelling system and more many instances of which are well documented so we have to ask, why would they all of a sudden decide to comply with a voluntary code of practice? More so if it applies only in the UK. And how are government to deal with all the own label brands that are out there, many of which we don’t even know who’s responsible for let alone local Trading Standards officers.
While in theory this looks to be a great idea and a “positive response” from government over a single issue, tumble dryer fires, we think that putting it into practice may be far more difficult than is currently imagined.
