As said in a previous post, industry's defence to the Environmental Audit Committee with regard to their support of the current Furniture Regulations has been, well, pathetic. All they've offered is opinion posing as fact and the strange inability to mention the fact that the Furniture Regulations in their current state make them a lot more money than they would if they were put right.
 
There is evidence that many in industry have always known these Regulations do not work, and all of them have known for sure since 2014 when the government published the evidence. What has been their response? - to deny, block, evade, lie and carry on raking in the cash.
 
All of which would be bad enough if it only involved money. But these Regulations in their current state mean that UK homes contain the highest volumes of flame retardant chemicals in the world. But they're safe, said Mr Kannah of the flame retardant industry to the EAC recently. When it was pointed out to him that flame retardants are often banned for being toxic he said they were working hard to make them safer. Meanwhile, millions of sofas and mattresses in the UK still contain the poisonous decaBDE, a now-banned brominated flame retardant which adds nothing at all to fire safety but certainly adds to toxicity and ill health.
 
What is the true mentality of the industry? It can be seen, for example, in the fact that they were told several years back by government lawyers that it is illegal and dangerous to be treating sofas with stain-repellent sprays. These often make sofas flammable again and can react with flame retardants to produce highly toxic fumes and dust. When I told a journalist this he was stunned. "So, you're telling me," he said, "that we pay more for our sofas because they contain flame retardant chemicals to supposedly make them flame resistant, then we pay more again to have them treated with stain repellent that makes them flammable again?"
 
He was right. And guess what: they're still persuading customers to pay extra for stain-repellent chemical treatments.
 
Then there's the perhaps somewhat ironic practice of undertreatment. This involves a textile manufacturer treating a roll of fabric properly with flame retardant chemicals – the "golden roll" as it's known in the business – and having it tested to the Furniture Regulations' requirements. But the fabric that's actually sold to manufacturers is under-treated, with everyone in the chain profiting nicely. Trading Standards found that around 80% of furniture fabrics on finished products fail the main ignition test because of this. You might think that's good because it means less flame retardants, doesn't it? Perhaps but it also proves the lie that these chemicals are needed to make your furniture fire-safe (that and the fact that the damn stuff wears off so easily anyway). And your home and blood will still be infected with large volumes of chemical dust – flame retardants and mixer chemicals which no one outside of the chemical treatment industry even knows the identity of. And the chemical, treatment and furniture industries will be profiting hugely from duping you into in effect paying for something you aren't getting.
 
Speaking of the chemical treatment industry, their representative organisation, FRETWORK, has made two written submissions to the EAC. Both were written by Peter Wragg. Mr Wragg has been involved throughout the ongoing review of the Furniture Regulations – ten years and counting now. However, he appears to have somehow completely avoided seeing all the evidence produced in that process to prove the current regulations are not fit for purpose. I'm sure the fact that if they're put right it would lead to the treatment industry taking a massive hit in profits has nothing to do with his continuing assertion that the regs are just fine as they are.
 
Mr Wragg makes a very nice living from chemicals. Most of the time, he is not required to defend the darker side of the negative effects they can have on health and the environment. When he is, he tends to react with condescending opinions presented as solid facts which he himself sometimes calls 'rants'. 
 
See for yourself. Below is a link to Mr Wragg's first submission to the EAC. I've gone through it in detail since I think it is worth exposing the fact that his members are in effect poisoning the entire country by treating (or undertreating) fabrics for regulations that do not work for no good reason other than profit. Sorry, that's remiss of me; I should have pointed out that Mr Wragg provides ample proof that the regulations work – see his "Case of the Pink Cushion' – really, I'm not making it up (he is).
 
FRETWORK submission with my comments here.

On 14th May, industry representatives gave oral witness to the Environmental Audit Committee's Inquiry into toxic chemicals in everyday life. The second session included representatives from FIRA, the British Furniture Confederation and Lanxess (ex-Chemtura). The key questions put to them by the EAC were: 

• Why is the UK alone in insisting on a [Furniture Regulations] match test (which doesn't work) for its furniture flammability regulations when the rest of the world agrees that a cigarette/smoulder test alone provides fire safety and which requires no flame retardants?

• What are your industries doing about reducing/removing harmful flame retardants from furniture?

• What have you been doing about getting the Furniture Regulations updated since 2014?

 
You can read the session transcript here: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/environmental-audit-committee/toxic-chemicals/oral/102212.pdf
 
Or watch the video recording here (second session starts at around 11:26:00): https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/2322b527-3fbc-45c6-ba06-eda9e872118e
 
It's no exaggeration to say that all three performed very poorly, offering no substantive answers to the Inquiry's questions at all. Indeed, they were often outright misleading and evasive, with some statements which can only be described as lying. 
 
Gareth Simkins and I will be submitting a full analysis on this session to the EAC. In the meantime, there is a short extract below.
 
By the way, Lanxess was represented by my old friend K, who in a neat circular fashion features in the very first blog post on this site. Then, I wrote about how he'd phoned in May 2012 to tell me that he'd heard we were planning to change the match test, even though Steve Owen and I had not discussed it with anyone else at that stage. Seven years on and K has certainly been successful in ensuring that massive amounts of his company's toxic products remain in our sofas. Big bonus every year, no doubt.
 
While we were waiting outside the EAC meeting room last week, I introduced Gareth to K. We asked K what his company was doing about removing the millions of kgs of the now banned flame retardant, decaBDE, still in millions of sofas and mattresses in UK homes (that Lanxess has made a fortune from). His reply was odd: he said that never has there been a death in a hospital that was diagnosed as being caused by a flame retardant chemical. Well, that's all right, then.
 
Extract from the EAC session with commentary:

Kerry McCarthy: The other thing is the allegations of corruption that were made against officials at what was then the BIS Department and the suggestion that there was interference with the process. Does anyone have any views on that? 

Kasturirangan Kannah: Can I go first again?

Kerry McCarthy: That was evidence from Terry Edge and Gareth Simkins.
 
Kasturirangan Kannah: Yes, there was one allegation made about an ex-Fire Services Chief, and the Chief of Merseyside was named. Our company—it was Chemtura then—had sponsored the Fire Safety Platform, as it was then. It has now moved on to the European Fire Safety Alliance. We completely refute any suggestion of corruption, totally.
 
Kerry McCarthy: In terms of your involvement in that, could you say a little bit more about what your involvement was in that process? 

Kasturirangan Kannah: Sure. The Fire Safety Platform’s objective was fire safety in the home. They talk about smoke detectors, they talk about vulnerable populations, they talk about unsafe furniture and so forth. That was their job. At no point did the Fire Safety Platform ever speak up on behalf of flame retardants. It made it very clear at the beginning that it would not do so. We respected that. We said as long as there is a spectrum of fire safety solutions, that is fine. That is exactly what it did. In terms of the specific allegation, I think the gentleman concerned has to respond to the allegation, but in our understanding there was no such impropriety, no corruption at all.

Commentary:
 
Chemtura (and the other FR companies) did indeed fund Mike Hagen's Fire Safety Platform (and his subsequent ventures). However, Hagen always claimed he was independent of them. But it's certainly not true that he never spoke out in favour of flame retardants. Hagen attended several BIS workshops and that is precisely the line he often took: that flame retardants equal fire safety. 
 
It may be worth looking a little closer at Mike Hagen's Fire Safety Platform's response to BEIS's 2014 consultation. He describes the FSP thus:
 
"The Fire Safety Platform is a non-profit association with a mission to reduce the risk from fire. It is an independent body that does not support any fire safety product, technology or commercial organisation. Support is welcome from all individuals and organisations concerned with fire safety. Currently, the Platform receives financial support from Albemarle, Busworld, Chemtura, the European Flame Retardants Association, ICL Industrial Products and Sprue Safety Products. Burson-Marsteller [PR company for flame retardant producers] acts as the secretariat to the Fire Safety Platform."
 
Given Burson-Marsteller's and Chemtura's etc deep involvement with trying to block fire safety changes to the California standard, it's a little hard to believe that Mike Hagen's attempts to do the same with the UK's proposals are independent of the same companies' aims here.
 
In his response, Hagen sets out his pro-FRs position pretty clearly: 
 
"There is a danger to the safety of UK and US citizens if 'scaremongering' [about the dangers of flame retardants] rather than balanced, risk-based arguments is allowed to prevail. For instance, the strong UK environmental lobby against such chemicals forced change in California which is widely accepted to be leading to a reduction in fire safety standards [hardly 'widely – only the FR industry and its supporters are claiming this]."
 
Hagen also claims that BIS's proposals are the sole work of Steve Owen who, he says, 'BIS has presented . . . as their 'guru' in these matters.' And concludes that Mr Owen's proposals do not appear to have 'been peer-reviewed nor subject to scrutiny by technical experts' – see above [earlier in our full commentary for the EAC] for proof that the opposite is the case. I perhaps should point out that Mr Owen was appointed as official technical advisor by his line managers, which followed his company (Intertek) winning an open tender to develop proposals for a new match test.
 
In 2018, Anna Stec told me that she was being incredibly frustrated in her efforts to obtain data about cancers in UK firefighters, chiefly by Mike Hagen and Dave Sibert who sit on all the relevant BSI committees and government-appointed bodies. She has since been commissioned by the FBU to look into such cancers, shortly after which Matt Wrack of the FBU told her that Dave Sibert (then fire safety officer for the FBU) had been sacked for 'colluding with the flame retardant industry'.
 
Earlier in the session, the Chair of the EAC pointed out that Chemtura had been responsible in the USA for setting up false citizens' safety groups to advocate for more flame retardants in products, and other lobbying activities; she said:

Chair: I am challenging you on your covert lobbying in the US. Does any of that go on here?
 
Kasturirangan Kannah: I cannot comment on what happened some years ago in the States, but I can find out more detail. You are saying it is covert lobbying on the part of Chemtura along with other companies. You need to— 
​
Commentary:
 
Kannah's wording is interesting here, i.e. "what happened some years ago in the States." Lobbying by the flame retardant industry is still very much alive in the USA. See this article in today's Guardian, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/massachusetts-flame-retardants-firefighters-safety-cancer- about how lobbying from the American Chemistry Council is blocking bills to remove flame retardants in a lot of US States. Kannah's company, Lanxess, is a member of the ACC, as are the other two huge flame retardant producers, ICL and Albemarle.
 
K goes on to deny that any kind of similar lobbying has gone on in the UK where changes to the Furniture Regulations are concerned. However, as this blog has recorded, the three FR companies and their PR outfit, Burson Marsteller frequently lobbied me and always to press me to keep up the high levels of flame retardants in UK furniture. Flame retardants equals fire safety, they often chanted. Well, this EAC session showed that they do not have the faintest bit of evidence to support that claim; indeed, all the actual evidence points the other way.
 
 
 

The Environmental Audit Committee's inquiry into toxic chemicals in everyday life held its second witness session on Tuesday 30 April – you can view it here: https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/02213e37-0dfe-47c3-89eb-b487ab5b0d86.
 
Following this, on the same day, the All Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group met to discuss the Furniture Regulations and fridge-freezers with the BEIS Minister, Kelly Tolhurst MP (this meeting is not publicly available). The Furniture Regulations were also on the table for the EAC session. Because of this, the CEO of the Office for Product Safety and Standards (part of BEIS), Graham Russell, was present at both meetings. His demeanour varied considerably, however, between the two, mainly because at the EAC he was under direct questioning while at the second all he had to do was sit next to the Minister who did all the talking. At one he looked nervous and shifty, at the other he appeared rather smug – I'll leave the reader to guess which was which.
 
Let's take a closer look at Graham Russell. Yesterday, an article appeared in Civil Service World about the OPSS and Mr Russell:
 
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/interview/safety-guard-office-product-safety-standards-chief-graham-russell-reflects-agency
 
Here are a few quotes from it:
 
Simply put, Russell says, the primary purpose of the office is to “make sure that consumers in the UK have confidence in the safety of the products they buy”.
 
[On the Grenfell Tower fire and BEIS's investigation of the fridge-freezer that is alleged to have started it] “The way that fire developed and had such a horrendous effect on human life, I think has also made us all rightly think again about making sure we’re doing enough, particularly for the most vulnerable people,” Russell says.
 
Products the OPSS regulates include toys, furniture and children’s clothing. “These are not products that people think are going to put their lives at risk.”
 
“What motivates me is that this is about protecting people – particularly the most vulnerable people. I think that’s what drives a lot of people in this area,” he says.
 
What motivates him most is protecting people, he says. And yet this man has known for several years that the Furniture Regulations do not work and are therefore putting the entire population at risk from toxic poisoning. He's right when he says people don't think that furniture is going to put their lives at risk – partly because he's telling everyone, including his Minister, that the Furniture Regulations actually work.
 
He also knows that people in his OPSS team have been telling other civil servants behind closed doors meetings that they know the Furniture Regulations don't work but don't know what to do about it. They're terrified at what the public will think and do if it gets out that these regulations have never worked and that his Department proved conclusively that they don't in 2014. In short, his successors and now he as the product safety boss are lying to the public and politicians purely to protect their backs.
 
He and his OPSS officials have also lied about their investigation into the Grenfell fridge-freezer that caught fire. They concealed the actual report into the product, just told the world that 'independent experts' (which were almost entirely just their own staff) had concluded that the product was safe. But if you get hold of the actual test report, it shows that in key areas the product is actually dangerous. How about that? Two products – furniture and white goods – that are putting the population at risk and Mr Russell is lying about them both. With the result that the people of Grenfell are being blocked from an important aspect of the truth about the fire.
 
Russell is also blocking the truth about the toxicity of furniture which is further preventing the Grenfell community from learning the full truth about what they were exposed to. 
 
If you watch his performance at the EAC, it's apparent that the committee was very exasperated with his ducking and diving around the fact that the OPSS in practice has been pretty useless since its formation at the start of last year. Also, he kept insisting that consumers were well protected from defective products, even though everyone in the room knows they aren't. For example, Robert Chantry-Price from the Trading Standards Institute, another witness, informed everyone that Trading Standards has lost 59% of its officers in recent years and had its budgets slashed. There were several wry smiles when Russell said the OPSS has £500K for Trading Standards to undertake product safety, which increased when Chantry-Price commented that TS officers do not have the funding to travel to the products and pay for them in the first place.
 
At one point in the APPG meeting, Lady Mar asked the BEIS Minister a question about the fact that organophosphate chemicals were removed from weed-killers because they're so toxic but they're heavily used in mattresses, including children's. Lady Mar asked Tolhurst what she thought about the fact children are being poisoned as they sleep. Tolhurst chose to go on the offensive, stating that this was an "aggressive" question and how dare anyone question how she felt about children's health. This led to Lady Mar having to clarify that of course she is criticising the Department's policy. Which should not have been necessary of course, since Kelly Tolhurst's personal feelings are irrelevant. However, acting outraged allowed her to avoid answering the question and Lady Mar's additional point that the match test doesn't work. 
 
Instead, Tolhurst repeated endlessly that while BEIS is looking at the possible negative effects of flame retardants, she will not do anything to risk fire safety (of furniture). Let's be clear about this: Graham Russell knows full well that the Furniture Regulations do not work and represent a huge risk to the entire UK public. Yet he's briefing his Minister that they working, which is a lie, pure and simple.

In short, he is the key person responsible for ensuring that millions of children in this country are being poisoned by toxic flame retardants on a daily basis.
 
What kind of man is that?
 
Oh, at the end of the EAC session I approached Mr Russell and introduced myself. I started to ask him if he'd read his own Department's 2014 consultation document and technical annex, since these prove that the current match test doesn't work. But he jumped to his feet, avoiding my gaze, and said, "I'm not hear to talk to anyone; I'm not discussing anything with you!" I started to point out that he's a public servant and I'm a member of the public but he literally shoved me aside and, now red-faced, rushed from the room.
 
Now, I don't know about you but I figure that's not the way a man behaves who believes in what he's saying. Such a man would stand his ground, look me in the eye, and point out exactly why I'm wrong, along with warning me to stop spreading lies about his Regulations and unnecessarily spooking the UK public.