Electrical Products: Online Sales

Kelly Tolhurst Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Kelly Tolhurst)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I thank the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for securing this important debate. She is incredibly passionate about this issue and, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for home electrical safety, has played an important role in keeping a focus on it. Her commitment to electrical safety is to be commended.

I want to make it clear from the outset that in my 12 months in this post, I too have taken electrical safety and the safety of British consumers extremely seriously. It has been a focus of mine; I have spent a lot of time working on it in my day job within the Department.

It is clear that there is considerable interest among hon. Members in this issue. They have personal, and in some cases tragic, reasons for that interest. I again thank the hon. Member for Swansea East, and I thank the hon. Members who intervened on her for participating in this short debate.

Our first duty as elected Members must be to ensure the safety of those we represent. It is important that consumers should have a choice when it comes to buying all kinds of products. In today’s world, more and more of us are turning to online retailers when we purchase all manner of things, including electrical products. The changing ways in which we consumers purchase goods, including online, pose specific challenges in relation to protecting consumers. For a traditional market, the law is clear: manufacturers and importers have a duty to place only safe products on the UK market, and distributors have a duty of care when it comes to the safety of electronic products. The online marketplace makes it possible for consumers to sell to other consumers. That clearly presents new challenges. We recognise those challenges and are working with the platforms to address the issues.

The OPSS is taking forward a number of strategic projects aimed at understanding and addressing cross-cutting safety issues to deliver better protections for British consumers. One of those is rightly focused on tackling the challenges of online electrical product sales. The OPSS, working closely with a number of key stakeholders—including Electrical Safety First, which the hon. Member for Swansea East mentioned, and major online retailers—is bringing together those with specific expertise in this area to make the system work more effectively. The project is at an early stage, but a first strand is focused on evidence gathering, so that we can really understand how and where electrical products are being sold online. That work will form the basis of ensuring that we have the best system in place to protect people when they buy goods in online or offline marketplaces.

In addition, the OPSS is working with local authorities to ensure that checks are being made by sellers on products being sold online to determine whether they are subject to a recall. If a business is found to be selling recalled products, the OPSS will inform the business of its findings, so that the business can take immediate steps to remove the product from sale.

[Gerald Jones]

Will the Minister recognise that in the current climate, the financial pressures on local authorities make it more difficult for them to have the capacity to deal with some of the issues that she is discussing?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

When we are talking about such a wide brief as consumer product safety, there will always be pressures on budgets, but the OPSS is working with local trading standards, with scientific, technical support. It is providing support, through training, to trading standards, to enable local authorities to carry out the job that they have been tasked with doing.

The hon. Member for Swansea East asked a direct question about Whirlpool and the published list of recalled models, and I want to address that straight off. If products on the recall list are being sold on online platforms, that is absolutely wrong, and I will instruct our officials to ensure that those online platforms are made aware of those products, and that the products are withdrawn, as I have outlined. The hon. Lady will appreciate, because she knows this area very well, that this is ongoing work. Market surveillance—the identification of illegal and unsafe products—is not a job done today or tomorrow, with one list. Market surveillance is ongoing, and is how we continue to protect consumers. It is right that our policy and research evolves. This is work that we do independently as a Government to ensure that consumer safety is always our top focus.

[Patricia Gibson]

The Minister has talked about fines and punishments for people selling illegal or unsafe products online. Does the product safety and standards unit monitor particular sites, or does it wait for the public to make representations about them? I am interested to know how the sites operate and how they are monitored. Where does the intelligence about illegal or unsafe products come from?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

As part of the OPSS’s ongoing work, it has developed a database through which information is shared with online platforms when we are alerted to problems and particular safety concerns. That list is changing every day or every week, as new illegal products are registered. It is an ongoing piece of work, and part of what we are doing weekly to combat people who act illegally by putting illegal products on the market, and also to ensure that unsafe products that are being marketed are removed from sale. I have already outlined that this is a big challenge; it is something that the OPSS is very mindful of. That is why it is included in the first part of the workstream about understanding the extent to which such products are sold and how that can be moved forward.

A further strand of this work relates to online sales in second-hand electrical goods. OPSS is gathering evidence on the extent of the second-hand electrical goods market across the UK, so that it can provide advice to sellers on their responsibility when selling second-hand goods online.

[Carolyn Harris]

Has the Minister’s Department seen the listings put up overnight, and has it taken action to remove Whirlpool products from online platforms?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

That is a conversation that I did not have with my officials prior to the debate, so I am unable to give a direct answer. However, I have already outlined that the list has been published on the website and has been shared with our enforcement agencies. Where products on the list are being sold by online platforms, our enforcement bodies such as OPSS or trading standards—whoever is available or appropriate to deal with it—should absolutely ensure that they are removed from sale. That is a sensible thing to suggest, and I am sure the hon. Lady would expect me to say nothing less.

We have been running a series of campaigns to raise consumer awareness on keeping safe. This is being done in partnership with the leading consumer bodies, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Electrical Safety First, the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, Netmums and the Child Accident Prevention Trust. I was lucky enough to visit the CTSI symposium a couple of weeks ago, where I met many of those organisations. As part of the programme, OPSS and those organisations are planning a specific consumer campaign targeting issues that relate to online sales. I am sure that hon. Members agree that consumers are better able to protect themselves when they have the information and are aware of the risks.

OPSS is working to address the challenges posed by the operation of fulfilment houses. New types of businesses have emerged, and it is recognised that we need to do more online. They provide a range of services to online retailers. This work aims to combat the distribution of unsafe and non-compliant products in the UK supply chain via fulfilment houses. OPSS is working closely with local authorities and trading standards, and is targeting those businesses that choose to place unsafe or non-compliant products on the market without regard for the safety of their customers. This is an ambitious, two-year project. Our early work with national trading standards, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Border Force and local trading standards has already identified targets.

The project is bringing together OPSS, local authorities, HMRC and the Intellectual Property Office to develop a multi-agency approach to tackling the new risks that the new model of sale and delivery poses to UK consumers. OPSS has been working to understand the scope of the challenge facing trading standards from fulfilment houses, and it has developed an up-to-date intelligence profile to ensure that activity in this area is targeted at the appropriate businesses. As I mentioned, the scale of this project is significant, and it has the potential to make a serious impact on the sale of unsafe products online. Projects on this scale bring together local and national bodies, and that is one of the reasons why OPSS was created. We now have the capacity and focus to identify and tackle issues on a national scale.

Although there are many challenges from online sales, a number of which the hon. Lady has outlined, many online sales businesses already have strong relationships with trading standards and work with them to ensure the safety of the consumers to whom they sell. Businesses with primary authority relationships with an individual trading standards department know that they have available to them an expert source of assured and tailored advice on complying with consumer product safety regulations. Working closely with trading standards can help online sellers identify and address at an early stage product safety issues that may arise. E-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay are uniquely well placed to play an important role in product safety. A significant number of electrical products are sold through these platforms, which have systems to track these products.

The hon. Lady mentioned that Amazon has yet to engage with her and the APPG, but eBay has. Amazon and eBay have strong primary authority relationships in place. In both cases, the partnership has established robust systems to monitor products and sellers. Should non-compliant or unsafe products be identified, there are arrangements in place to ensure that product listings are removed from those sites quickly. I want to make it clear that we are under no illusion about the scale of the task. Those companies are among the largest in the world, and we cannot afford to be complacent about dealing with them.

As this is a global issue, OPSS is encouraging major online retailers to sign up to the product safety pledge that was initiated by the EU Commission. Under the pledge, online retailers commit to taking specific actions on the safety of products that are sold on their platform by third parties. The aim of the scheme is to improve the detection of unsafe products before they are sold to consumers, or as soon as possible afterwards.

I have spoken about the work that OPSS is doing directly to tackle the risks from second-hand and online sales, but it is important to remember that local trading standards are the main enforcers of product safety up and down the country. They play a hugely important role, and OPSS has been working with them to provide the technical and scientific advice, data and intelligence that supports their work every day. OPSS has developed a new product safety database to capture and share information on unsafe goods, so that risks can be identified and action taken as quickly as possible. It is already being rolled out across trading standards, and OPSS provided £500,000 last year to fund the testing of products by trading standards. We have increased that sum to £600,000 for 2019-20.

The hon. Lady asked many questions on issues such as additional resources and changes to the law. She will appreciate that this is the first time such questions have been levelled at me. I am more than happy to attend a meeting of the APPG, as I indicated I would; unfortunately, diaries have meant that I have been unable to. I will happily write to the hon. Lady with further detail on that, or we can have a meeting to discuss the issues—whichever way she prefers to communicate with me.

I want to reiterate that this is “job not done”. This is about how we evolve in a changing market and ensure that importers, manufacturers and marketers place safe products on the market. The onus is on the companies to ensure that they place safe products on the market. We will do all we can to ensure that we continue to monitor products and try to protect consumers as best we can. That is something that I feel very strongly about.

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing forward this important issue. I understand her passion and am desperately sorry about what happened to her constituent. I look forward to constructive conversations with her in the future.

Question put and agreed to.