Lithium-ion Battery Safety Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 6th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Winston, who in his own way has made us think more deeply about the chemistry, which we often do not. The specific points he made about the chemistry would probably be covered by secondary legislation or below that in regulations from the OPSS.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Redesdale on bringing his Private Member’s Bill and on securing such an early Second Reading. His speech and the description of the clauses of the Bill have set the scene very well for us. I thank the organisations that have given us briefings, including the London Fire Brigade, Electrical Safety First, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the House of Lords Library and the LGA. I declare my interests as a vice-president of the LGA, and as vice-chair of the APPG on Fire Safety and Rescue, which I have been for over a decade.

As an officer of the APPG on Fire Safety and Rescue, I had a meeting with the Minister responsible for regulation and representatives of the Office for Product Safety and Standards in the Department for Business earlier this year, along with other officers from the APPG, on this issue of regulating lithium batteries and their safe disposal. I will come on to some of those details later.

The fire background is stark. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, that our fire services absolutely know what is happening, and the APPG has been seeking meetings with Ministers at, I think, four different departments and counting. Part of the problem is that there are many different areas to be covered, so it is wonderful that we now have a Bill which enables us proper parliamentary time to discuss it. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, that the London Fire Brigade told us that London alone had 143 fires last year, in which there were three deaths and 60 injuries. In the first eight months of this year alone there have been 127 e-bike and e-scooter fires.

Last year in Cambridge, Gemma Germeney and her children, Lilly and Oliver Peden, lost their lives when an e-bike bought online exploded and set their flat on fire. Her partner, Scott Peden, was in a coma for a month and has prolonged injuries as a result. He has demanded tougher regulations for such devices. He had no idea of the dangers of the item he bought online. Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service wrote to the coroner to ask for better regulation of online sales of e-bike batteries. Although the inquest has been opened and adjourned, it has not yet come to its final conclusion, and it will be interesting to hear the coroner’s views on what should happen.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fire Safety and Rescue has seen videos of lithium battery fires. The description of the fire by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, was helpful, but actually watching that white explosive fire burning at 1,000 degrees gives a lasting impression of how dangerous they can be.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology provided a helpful focus on how regulation and development might work in practice. Thinking about building in safe design alongside assessing product risks is vital. If there are clear standards and firm regulation in design, the sector will work much better. The institution also suggests greater OPSS involvement with international alert systems for dangerous products —for example, Safety Gate—but this must be adequately funded and staffed. There has already been reference to global online markets these days, and it is really short-sighted to think that self-regulation could ever stop at our borders. I will return to that in relation to flying with lithium batteries.

The OPSS also has a role in raising consumer awareness levels and changing purchasing behaviours, which would thereby complement enforcement measures. That is the biggest thing that we need to do. Just having adverts saying these things might be dangerous is not enough. None of us is aware of how many lithium batteries we have around us every day.

The LGA forwarded the data on fires in waste trucks and waste sites, which is really shocking. Local government and large retailers, such as supermarkets, can and should help to raise awareness about the disposal of batteries, especially those that cannot be removed from small appliances, for example, electric toothbrushes.

Most people do not know that the act of crushing even a healthy battery is likely to cause a fire. It is the act of crushing that does it. Anything that goes into the waste could be compacted either in a truck—there have been fires in trucks—or on the waste site itself.

The London Fire Brigade suggests some possible strengthening of the Bill. That has been covered by other noble Lords and I will not repeat it. I shall move to the LFB’s concerns about Clause 4, which states that lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles must have a safety fire certificate. There has been mention of micromobility vehicles needing to be clearly defined. The LFB suggests that perhaps mobility scooters ought to be added to the list of registrations.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked to us about doing regulation properly, which relates to one of the problems that the all-party group faced. I want to come on to the details of why this is. We are thinking only about where there has been a fire, but we have not yet got to grips with how people’s lives can be affected by the poor regulation that we have at the moment, but not in a fire-safe way. I apologise for using personal examples, but scooters and wheelchairs with lithium batteries are a real problem for disabled people. We had a debate in your Lordships’ House last year where I said:

“The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra … talked about the ridiculous process we have to fill in for our wheelchair dimensions and battery details when booking the flight, then again when the airline confirms the booking, then again when you check in online to get your seat, then again when you arrive at check-in and again when you arrive at the departure gate”.—[Official Report, 23/11/23; col. 97GC.]


That is because everybody in the airport is worried about batteries. They cannot take the evidence that you have given them.

In an APPG meeting with the Fire Minister last year, we were told that there was a plan to produce wheelchair and wheelchair-battery passports. That seems to be really helpful because not only would it act as evidence that the battery had been bought safety and approved but there would be the numbers of the batteries in the passport and it could act as a logbook. I know I have to have my electric wheelchairs maintained at least twice a year to make sure that the batteries and other parts are safe, so that is important. However, I have had three experiences in the past year where there has been an issue with my wheelchair batteries. First, an airport refused to allow my wheelchair on a plane because it said, incorrectly, that the lithium batteries were too big even though they met the IATA regulations. Secondly, after I flew to Bucharest using not my lithium battery chair but my bus battery chair, the ground services manager told me that I personally had to physically lift out my two bus batteries and carry them on to the plane because I needed to have them with me in the cabin. Thirdly, I hit a problem when I got to Sweden: I had been allowed out there with the wheelchair with the lithium batteries but was refused a flight back. I persuaded the company that that would not look very good because they had flown me out three days earlier. We need to think about this sort of thing because if we start regulating only for safety, we will completely miss the way that all of us live with batteries in our lives. For those of us for whom lithium batteries make travel easier, if we are buying the right things, we should not be penalised.

I shall end a point about making sure that all departments are involved. It is right that the Department for Business and Trade and the OPSS lead on this. However, as far as fire is concerned, we already have a problem with where the dividing line is between the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Home Office. There are other issues as well, particularly for disabled people, so there needs to be involvement from the Disability Minister too. Will the Minister ensure that, as the Bill progresses, the discussions that were beginning to happen between Ministers across departments in the previous Government continue, and that, particularly for issues affecting disabled people, the Disability Minister and disability organisations are kept informed as well?