Faulty Tumble Dryers (Fire Risk)

Debate between Andy Slaughter and Iain Wright

Tuesday 13th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[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.