Whirlpool: Product Safety System

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Andrew Bingham

Wednesday 26th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter]

I absolutely agree and I know that a number of Members from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, some of whom are here today, have been putting a lot of pressure on. I hope that pressure will continue, because clearly the current Trading Standards regime does not work. That is why we need the Government to intervene and not simply say that this is a matter that can be resolved at local authority level.

Given that the Shepherds Court fire was more than eight months ago, I am disappointed that I have had to come back to the House today to raise the matter again, as I had hoped that by now both the Government and Whirlpool would have taken action to remedy this situation. Unfortunately, however, there has been little progress: Whirlpool has not properly rectified the problem; and the Minister and the Government have not acted decisively. As a consequence, I believe lives are still at risk.

In particular, Whirlpool’s complete lack of accountability and responsibility for those consumers whose daily lives have been—and indeed are still being—put at risk, is simply unacceptable. The company’s behaviour throughout this whole process prompts the question of why anyone would want to buy a Whirlpool tumble dryer, or indeed any other product made by the company, in future.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and for securing this debate. I have a constituent who has a very similar story to the one he has just outlined. She asked me not to reveal her name, but she was using her tumble dryer and it actually exploded. Flames went up and hit the roof. We talk about the consequences of such fires for people’s lives. She lost pretty much everything and unfortunately she was not insured. This happened some time ago and she is still living with the consequences. All that time, as the hon. Gentleman said, Whirlpool seems to have been completely ambivalent about the consequences of these incidents for people’s lives.

[Andy Slaughter]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, because I believe that Whirlpool is cynically trying to delay everything from legal actions on liability through to inquests, to resist what in the end will undoubtedly be very substantial payments that it will have to make. However, the consequences of these incidents, particularly for poorer people who may not have insurance and who—as is the case with some of my constituents—have lost all their belongings as well as their homes, are absolutely devastating.

Since the fire in Shepherds Bush, Whirlpool has failed to answer the most basic questions in my correspondence with the company, and its letters in response are often written not by the company itself but by its PR agency, Ketchum.