Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Lord Redesdale Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his extremely kind words, especially about the Private Member’s Bill I have taken forward on lithium-ion safety. In this regard, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster for his years of work. Indeed, if he had been successful in the ballot and I had not, I think it would have been his Bill, which would have been fitting. On that basis, I recognise the work of Electrical Safety First, which has briefed many noble Lords, and its work on lithium-ion batteries.

Before I started, I was going to raise an issue with the noble Lord, Lord Frost—he is not in his place, but I can have a go at him anyway. I find it utterly incredible that, although we have moved to a Labour Government from the Conservative Government, there still seems to be this argument that convergence is a bad idea. In the area of standards, convergence is the best idea—it does not matter whether it is European or more international. The idea that convergence on standards is not excellent seems deranged. That is my personal view, obviously, from the Back Benches.

The great thing about a Private Member’s Bill is that, whether it becomes law or not, you get the areas of grievance talked about and hopefully prompt the Government into action. The Government have moved extremely fast in this area by bringing forward this Bill of their own. Also, the amount of discussion about lithium-ion does give the impression that this is one of the central tenets of the Bill, although it is of course going to be a great deal wider than that.

I focused on lithium-ion, but it is a very safe technology. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is sitting on lead acid batteries. I think her wheelchair would weigh about two tonnes if she were. She is actually sitting on lithium-ion batteries, which are extremely safe. However, there are of course situations in which they can be extremely dangerous—and not just the lithium-ion batteries in our e-bikes and their chargers, but any lithium-ion battery that we have in our homes.

Zurich and the British Metal Recycling Association have said that about 1,200 fires per year are caused by lithium-ion batteries in the waste stream—that is, waste trucks and disposal sites—because those batteries, while safe in people’s homes, tend to catch fire when they are crushed and put in water. While the Bill covers many of the areas covered in my Private Member’s Bill, it does not look at disposal. I say to the Minister that I am happy to shelve my Bill if I can talk to his officials about whether disposal could be added to this Bill.

There is a simple way to stop vast numbers of such fires, which are extremely dangerous, especially to the firefighters: to ensure that the people who sell such products online have a duty to make sure that the deliveries are equipped to take back batteries. Then, the massive numbers of batteries sitting around in people’s drawers would be safely taken back, rather than thrown into a truck in water and crushed, which is extremely unsafe and environmentally unsuitable. If we could encourage online marketplaces to take back batteries, as supermarkets do already, I could then shelve my Private Member’s Bill.

There is a second issue, of course: transport regulations. You can deliver as many batteries as you like, and that is not seen as hazardous, but if you take the same batteries away after they have been used, even a couple of days later, that is seen as hazardous waste. That also needs to be addressed.

The Minister is obviously going to have vast numbers of organisations, and his officials, looking at including as many areas as possible in the Bill. It is a Henry VIII Bill, but I can see why it needs to be so, because there are many areas it will have to look at. I have the opportunity now, in this House, to put forward one of the issues I would like to be covered: the scourge of bike theft, which had not occurred to me until I read in the Economist this week a particularly good article about bike thefts in the UK. Some 200,000 bikes were stolen last year, and that does not even include bikes stolen during burglaries. It is such a low priority that it seems to be almost impossible for the police to catch anybody who steals a bike. There is a solution. The article goes on to talk about work being done on Merseyside to stop people on bikes and find out whether they are stolen. An easy way to find out whether a bike is stolen is to look at its security marking. That would have a real impact on the number of bikes stolen, but also on the number of crimes committed by people on stolen bikes—snatching mobile phones and the like.

A simple solution in this Bill would be to make sure that any online platform has to include in the information given the security marking numbers of a bike. That would be an eminently suitable provision to include in the Bill. I would go further and say that retailers should be encouraged to provide bikes with markings in the first place. The article went on to say that the police have developed an app so that when bikes are recovered—you can do so on the online store—they can be returned to their owners, which is apparently so uncommon that it causes a great deal of surprise.

When I was a student in Newcastle, there was a shop on the Westgate Road called the Westgate Road Bazaar, which was fantastic because you knew you could get anything there and it was almost certainly stolen. Indeed, I know one young man who was done for his crime of passion: taking car alarms. In the days when you had to fit car alarms, he would steal them and sell them back to the garages, to be sold on. I digress, and although that is a humorous aside, the fact that bikes can be sold so easily on online platforms makes a mockery of the law, in a way, and is fuelling a massive trade in theft.

Therefore, I very much hope that I can talk to the Minister’s officials about the two points I have raised: the disposal of batteries, which could solve a lot of the problems caused by lithium-ion battery fires; and whether bikes could be included, because it would have a massive impact on crime in this country.