Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of changing from open flame standards to smoulder only test on the number of (a) deaths caused by fire and (b) home fires per year.

The ‘Product regulation: fire safety of domestic upholstered furniture’ consultation sets out proposals to reform the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 (FFRs), which set flammability requirements for domestic upholstered furniture. Proposals include ending mandatory open-flame testing, moving to a smoulder-based test consistent with the approaches adopted internationally.

In developing these proposals, the Government considered a wide range of evidence, including comparative international fire data. This shows that while UK fire deaths have declined since the 1980s, this trend has also occurred in other European countries that did not adopt the same flammability testing as the UK.