Faulty Tumble Dryers (Fire Risk)

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to talk about a serious issue that affects many millions of people. My own involvement arises from a tragic incident that occurred in my constituency only a few weeks ago. As we have a little more time than usual, I propose to explain briefly what that incident was, to talk about the evidence that emerged from it—which supports the course of action that I shall recommend to the Minister—and to ask the Minister a number of questions about the safety of tumble dryers. If there is time, I know that one or two of my colleagues who have rather more experience and expertise in this matter might wish to contribute, but I wish to leave enough time for the Minister to respond, not least because I was a little alarmed by her brief opportunity to respond to my question on this subject earlier today.

On the afternoon of 19 August, Debbie Defreitas, a constituent of mine, was in the kitchen of her home on the seventh floor of Shepherds Court, an 18-storey block of flats overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green. She became aware of a burning smell. Her Indesit tumble dryer was the only device that was switched on, so she unplugged it and pulled it away from the wall. When she opened the door, smoke came out. Debbie rang the fire brigade and retreated on to the landing. When firefighters arrived and entered the flat, the fire had taken hold. Thick smoke filled the building and flames arced upwards along the walls into other properties.

Over 100 families were evacuated, and 26 were found temporary accommodation in hotels that night. There is substantial damage both to individual flats and the block. Nine families, including the Defreitases, are still unable to return home. Twenty fire engines and 120 firefighters fought the blaze, which brought the centre of Shepherd’s Bush to a halt.

I spent some hours at the scene on the evening of 19 August. I cannot praise highly enough the firefighters who risked their lives, and the residents who showed incredible spirit and resilience despite losing their homes and in some cases all their possessions. Council officers and local councillors Sue Fennimore and Adam Connell worked into the early hours to ensure people were fed, comforted and found decent places to stay.

What is most remarkable is that, apart from three minor injuries, no one was hurt in the blaze, though the trauma, especially for those who witnessed the worst of the fire, may well have a longer-term effect. But the circumstances are very similar to those of the Lakanal House fire in Southwark in 2009 in which six people died. That, or worse, could easily have happened in this instance.

We await the publication of the investigations into the Shepherds Court fire, but one thing is already clear: Mrs Defreitas was following to the letter the advice given to her by Whirlpool, Indesit’s owners. Despite a fault affecting over 5 million dryers supplied by the company’s brands, it continues to tell customers

“you may continue to use your tumble dryer whilst waiting for the modification, however, we require that you do not leave your dryer unattended during operation.”

Whirlpool is not the only manufacturer trying to deal with defective dryers and other white goods that pose a fire risk. The London Fire Brigade estimates that there is one fire caused by white goods every day in London alone. The Local Government Association, which represents all fire authorities, says three fires a day are caused in England and Wales just by tumble dryers. Some cause minor damage, some are on the scale of Shepherds Court and some have resulted in deaths and serious injuries.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this important issue to the House for consideration. The components in the appliances are readily available across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the system of recall at present is not sufficient to ensure safety and, further, that new legislation—I hope the Minister will respond on this—is a matter of public safety and is prioritised as such?

[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and I know he has done a lot of work on this subject over a number of years. I do not know if he was present to hear the Minister’s response to me earlier today, when she said that we have an effective system of product recall. I think the hon. Gentleman would disagree with that, as I do, and I will come on to that later.

The Government are not short of advice. Two years ago the inquest into the death of Santosh Benjamin, caused by a defective Beko fridge-freezer, called for a new system of product recall, as did the independent review of product recall under consumer champion Lynn Faulds Wood, which reported in February this year. The LFB’s “Total Recalls” campaign, the Consumers Association and “Expect it’s safe”—a campaign set up by solicitors Leigh Day, who represent many of the victims of white goods fires—have made similar demands.

I shall come back to what the Minister has said, and I want her to be aware—if she is not already—of the preponderance of opinion on this subject. I have mentioned the London Fire Brigade, but we could equally apply these views to other fire brigades around the country, which are represented by the Local Government Association. The London fire commissioner, Ron Dobson, has said:

“If my kitchen had one of the recalled goods in it, I would unplug it straight away until it has been checked and repaired. The speed with which the fire took hold shows how dangerous a faulty tumble dryer can be. That’s why we are calling for Whirlpool to urgently change their advice to consumers.”

Earlier today, I met representatives of Which?, whose very effective campaign has included the use of mystery shopping. This all shows just how appalling Whirlpool is in using these filibustering tactics.

[Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)]

I should like to declare an interest: I am a consumer of the said faulty tumble dryer, having bought one last year. The hon. Gentleman and I have already spoken briefly about this matter, but I should like to further inform him that I wrote to the managing director of Whirlpool UK, Maurizio Pettorino, in April this year. He took a month to respond, and his response was appalling. He did not answer the questions I had put to him. I wrote to him again on 23 May, but he has not responded to my letter. Nor has he responded to my repeated telephone calls. A public affairs company called Ketchum is involved in this matter, but it is refusing to respond to my reasonable requests. Like many consumers, I filled out the online Whirlpool form and was told I would have to wait 10 weeks before being given a date. Those 10 weeks have come and gone, but I have not received a date. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is time that Maurizio Pettorino thought about resigning from his job?

[Andy Slaughter]

I will talk about that particular gentleman in a moment. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving the House his own experience. He illustrates my point that no one is immune to these tactics. This is a studied campaign by Whirlpool to ensure that it delays for weeks, months or even years before it carries out the repairs. It knows that there are millions of machines out there, but it is not prepared to provide the resources to deal with the problem. The hon. Gentleman will probably get a number and be told to ring back in a couple of months, at which time he might be told that he will get an appointment to get his dryer repaired several months after that. He will also be told that, in the meantime, he can continue to use it. That is very dangerous.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, given that we are talking about public safety, there is a clear responsibility to protect consumers? I have a constituent who has been told she will have to wait at least 16 months, and she is now about halfway through that wait. There is no apparent end in sight, and this is a real evasion of responsibility. We need the Government to provide much more protection for consumers when companies behave so irresponsibly.

[Andy Slaughter]

It is extraordinary for someone to be asked to wait 16 months when a machine that could catch fire at any moment is in their home, yet the manufacturer is saying that they can continue to use it provided they are at home at the time.

We have also heard from Electrical Safety First, a well respected charity, and the chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, who was on the radio, on “You and Yours”, earlier this week has told people not to buy Whirlpool products. I know that the Minister was praying trading standards in aid earlier, but she should look at what the Chartered Trading Standards Institute is saying before she does so again. Many people who are far more expert than I am in this field are concerned about this.

I also want to mention the media. It is always nice to mention them when they are doing good things. The Daily Mirror has run a fantastic campaign and put this issue on its front page many times, and ITN has run an excellent campaign. However, this multinational corporation appears to be immune to all that, and to what many Members of Parliament have said about the issue.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on home electrical safety, will have a chance to contribute to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), who has more than 20 years’ experience as a firefighter, and I attended a meeting today of the all-party parliamentary fire safety and rescue group, chaired by the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess). The Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has also raised the matter with Whirlpool. The problem is not that there are no well-informed people lobbying hard; it is that the corporation is not prepared to listen and that the Government do not seem prepared to make it listen.

Three things have shocked me. I appreciate that I am coming late to the issue, but my first point is about the scale of the Shepherd’s Bush fire. A senior fire officer said to me today that as he arrived at Shepherd’s Bush Green on 19 April and saw the flames running up the side of Shepherds Court from the 7th floor to the 11th floor, he thought that the London Fire Brigade would be dealing with multiple serious injuries and fatalities because of his experience at the Lakanal House fire.

I have tracked down 750 fires caused by Whirlpool dryers and by dryers from brands owned by Whirlpool between 2004 and 2015. We know about 127 models, but Whirlpool will not publish the full list. At least 5.3 million machines were manufactured and sold over the period. There have also been deaths. Two young men died in Wales, but I will not talk about that case in detail because it is subject to an inquest that has dragged on for two years.

Moving on to the second thing that shocked me—the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) will appreciate this—I wrote to and actually got quite a speedy response from Maurizio Pettorino, the chief executive of Whirlpool UK, asking what the company was going to do given the circumstances of the Shepherd’s Bush fire. Mrs Defreitas was in the same room as the dryer throughout and suspected that the dryer might be responsible even though there was no smoke at that time. She unplugged it and rang the fire brigade as soon as she could and then retreated from the flat, shutting the door. What more could she have been expected to do? I wrote to Mr Pettorino the week after the fire with those points. In what I think was a standard letter, he wrote back saying

“we are advising consumers that their tumble dryers can continue to be used while the repair programme is underway… We are also asking customers not to leave their dryers unattended during operation, either while asleep or out of the house.”

That is comforting. The flat was relatively small, but if someone has a large house, it appears from those instructions that the company would be perfectly happy for them to be on the second floor while the dryer is merrily catching fire in the kitchen. I simply do not understand how that can continue to be the advice. It is not right—I asked the Minister about this morning and I hope she has had time to reflect on it—that these dryers, with their known faults, continue to be in use even if someone in the house is awake and alert. We know from Mrs Defreitas’s experience that if a machine catches fire, there may be nothing that can prevent it from burning down not only the consumer’s property but neighbours’ properties, too.

The third thing that shocked me—I take no pleasure from saying this because I am trying be consensual—is the Minister’s response. I wrote to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—I am glad he is in his place on the Front Bench—on 1 September but have not yet received a response. I thought that I might get one today given that this debate was happening, but I am sure that I will in due course. I gave notice of the questions that I wanted answered and tried to adopt a consensual tone, but the response that I received at Question Time this morning was that there is

“an effective system of product recall”,

that a steering group has been established

“to consider the recommendations in Lynn Faulds Wood’s… review”,

and that

“a full risk assessment of the product that has been agreed with Peterborough… trading standards”.

I am sorry, but that is not good enough. The risk assessment has not been published and it is the practice of manufacturers not to publish such assessments. Why are the public and the people who are being advised to continue using these admittedly dangerous machines not able to see the risk assessment? I am afraid that the response has been anything but robust. I am totally sympathetic to local trading standards departments, which have had, on average, 50% of their budgets cut. There is no equality of arms between Peterborough City Council trading standards and the Whirlpool Corporation, a multinational, multi-million-pound organisation. In many cases, trading standards have neither the resources nor the powers to deal with situations such as this. If they felt that what recall process there is was not being satisfactorily dealt with, they could take Whirlpool to the magistrates court, and if they were successful—this would take a lot of time and effort—there might be a fine running into hundreds or possibly even a few thousand pounds, for a regulatory offence. I do not believe that is enough to motivate Whirlpool to change from its current policy of waiting 16 months before effecting a repair to one where it immediately says, “You have a dangerous machine that we have manufactured in your house. Do not use it. We will come to repair or replace it immediately.” Such a change is what I would like to see.

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Customer safety is everything in business, as is the reputation of a corporation. Would my hon. Friend think about the contrast between how Whirlpool has dealt with this and the immediate recall, admittedly not in this country, by Samsung of the Galaxy Note 7? That recall will knock extraordinary amounts of value off Samsung’s balance sheet, but the company took the view that reputation is important and so is customer service. Hotpoint-Whirlpool has a responsibility to account for this publicly, because it is undermining its reputation and causing real problems with customers.

[Andy Slaughter]

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head; the two companies are adopting completely opposite strategies. No doubt they both have commercial motivations, but one has been benevolent and one has not. Samsung thinks, “Right, we will take the hit now, because we believe in the long-term reputation of our company.” Whirlpool is trying to go below the radar. There will have been many reports of these many hundreds of fires in local newspapers and, occasionally, in the national press, but there is not an understanding across the general population that millions of people may have these dryers in their homes and that they pose a risk. Many of these dryers are not even registered.

I wish to make just two more points, as I want a little time for not just the Minister, but other hon. Members to speak. The first goes back to the Lynn Faulds Wood review, which was an independent review set up and supported by government. The review reported, making a number of serious and well-thought-out recommendations about how a product recall system could work in this country. I am afraid to say that it has been dealt with in a very cynical fashion. Almost all the recommendations have either been ignored or pooh-poohed in some way. The only thing that has happened since it reported is that a steering group has been set up. All of us who watched “Yes Minister” will know that setting up a steering group is what you do when you do not want to do anything. This is a particularly ineffective steering group. It was given six months to meet, and they will end on 4 November. I do not how many times it has met, because it has not published any reports or minutes. I do know the membership of it, so I know that it has more representatives of manufacturers and retailers than of safety experts, from the fire service and elsewhere. I know very little else about it, so perhaps one other thing the Minister can clarify today is: what is happening with the recommendations of Lynn Faulds Wood’s report? Will the Minister look at them again? That was a serious piece of work, so will she seriously think about whether a new system of product recall should be established in this country? In the meantime, will she tell us what this steering group is doing and what happens when it allegedly finishes its work on 4 November?

There are many, many defects in this. Most of my constituents, and most constituents of other Members, will be living in a world of false security, in that they will believe that in the UK in 2016 there is a system of product recall. They will not realise that in many cases manufacturers have no idea where their products go. Part of the reason for that is that there is no compulsory registration, and there is not even an incentive to register products when they are bought because usually in the process of registering a product people are also asked to sign up to all the marketing and other guff that comes out of that. Rather than being bothered and pestered to buy all sorts of warranties that they do not want, people will say, “No, I am not going to register this product.” Consequently, between 1 million and 2 million of the Whirlpool machines have just disappeared; we do not know where they are. Before we can do a product recall, we must know where the machines are.

--- Later in debate ---

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Chris Heaton-Harris)

[Andy Slaughter]

I do not think that anybody, including Whirlpool, will deny that this is a serious fault. We know of one particular fault, which is the ignition of trapped fluff when these machines reach very high temperatures. There may be other faults as well, I do not know. There are certainly faults in other white goods. When a defect of that kind becomes apparent and when it is clear that it poses a risk to life, limb and property, trading standards, the manufacturer and, in the absence of their being able or willing to act, the Government must ensure that there is a proper product recall, that dangerous products are not used, and that those products are either repaired or replaced.

I regard it as a bit of an obscenity that if a person does not want to wait 16 months to have their dryer repaired, they can buy a new one from Whirlpool. They get it at a discounted value, yes, and it is quite a low price, but why should they have to buy that new product? Why should they not be entitled to have it replaced immediately for nothing so that they can use the product not just successfully, but with security? [Interruption.] I heard the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) say from a sedentary position that the replacement products are often no safer than the ones that have been taken away. I urge the Minister, who is relatively new to her post—I do not want to have a row with her—to go and have a look at these issues. I am sure that, like me, the hairs on the back of her neck will start standing up when she looks into them.

I do not wish to pillory only Whirlpool. I have mentioned other companies and the fact that this goes much further in relation to white goods and electrical safety generally. Let us tackle this immediate and known problem now and ensure that there are no more incidents such as the Shepherd’s Bush fire, the consequences of which my constituents, my council and many other people will be dealing with for months and years to come. There have been no admissions, no offers of assistance, no compensation or payment and no expressions of real regret by Whirlpool. If that tumble dryer had not been in that flat, my constituents could have continued to enjoy the quiet of their homes. I regard this matter as totally unacceptable. It is corporate malpractice on a grand scale. I do not want the Minister to reply by saying, “Peterborough City Council trading standards can sort this out.” I want her and her Secretary of State to take responsibility, and that is the message that I want to take back to my constituents tonight.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I have been in contact with trading standards, and to date I have been satisfied with its approach. The advice and guidance through the process of modification that Whirlpool is implementing whereby one has to attend the tumble dryer while it is carrying out its operation is certainly inconvenient—I would be the first to admit that. If one has dual meters so that machines can be put on overnight, that does not help with energy conservation. However, I am not yet persuaded that the product is necessarily unsafe, because the very few fires overall in terms of the 5 million machines that have been sold have mostly been contained within the machine. On being present, bearing in mind what trading standards believes to be a very low risk, I think that the advice is reasonable given that a total product recall is unlikely to get back more than one in four machines.

[Andy Slaughter]

rose—

[Margot James]

As it is the hon. Gentleman’s debate, I will give way one last time.

[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, but she has not dealt with the point that I emphasised in my speech. In the Shepherd’s Bush case, which nobody says was anything other than one of the most serious fires, the machine was observed. I think she will be aware that in Australia, where the machines have exactly the same fault, the advice is that customers should cease using the product immediately. The solution to one in four being recalled is to improve the registration system, and the solution to knowing what is in Whirlpool’s mind is for it to publish its risk assessment. Those are the questions that need to be answered.