Whirlpool Tumble Dryers: Product Recall

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, while thanking the Minister for repeating the Statement, I find it rather complacent. Whirlpool and the Government have rather dillied and dallied over this, despite tumble dryers causing a third of fires started by appliances; that is probably three per day.

Even now, with a belated recall covering only 500,000 of the affected machines, there is no list of the models available and Whirlpool refuses to release these details. The Minister urges people,

“with an unmodified, affected tumble dryer ... to unplug them and to contact Whirlpool”.

But consumers do not know whether their dryer is one of those affected, and even the charity Electrical Safety First has been denied the list. So consumers have first to find a serial number, which is not always easy, and then go on to a website and type in the serial number to even see whether their machine is affected. This is not good enough. Will the Government either compel Whirlpool to come clean with a list of the affected models, or publish the list themselves, because we know they have it?

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am not sure where the noble Baroness gets her figures, but they were faintly alarmist. She claimed that a third of all fires caused by domestic appliances were caused by tumble dryers. The figures I have show that the number of fires caused by domestic tumble dryers is coming down. There were only 724 last year, down from 808 the previous year—a 10% fall. I am told that in the figures for 2017-18, if you take all domestic appliances, some 16,000 fires were caused by electric appliances—so tumble dryers did not cause a third of them, as the noble Baroness claimed.

I will not defend Whirlpool, but it has mounted a fairly large operation to try to identify where the appliances are. It is reckoned that Whirlpool has got to something like 50% of the tumble dryers that need to be looked at, and there are probably another 500 or 1,000 or so to get at. We welcome Whirlpool’s response on what it is doing to identify those machines, get at them and make the appropriate modifications. As I said in the Statement, the number of fires in modified appliances is significantly lower than in those that have not been modified. I must repeat that the manufacturer has the responsibility to ensure product safety, and it should be for the Government—which is what we have done here—to take the appropriate action to hold it to account.