It seems the OPSS is currently pressing FW/6 (working group at British Standards Institute) to base the new ignition standard for their new furniture regulations on the European standard EN 1021 Part 1 and 2. EN 1021 is for cigarette resistance (Part 1) and match/open flame resistance (Part 2) over a test rig to simulate an upholstered chair. It was originally based on the UK's cigarette and match tests (BS 5852 parts 1&2) with some differences, one of them significant.
 
Here's what's wrong with this plan (as every single member of FW/6 well knows):
 
1.         EN 1021 Part 2 is not as stringent as the UK's open flame test, e.g. the test flame is placed against the fabric for 20 seconds in the UK test but only for 15 seconds in the EN test. Why the difference? Well, it seems that the huge fibre-producing German company Trevira worked hard on the EN committee responsible to get this 5 seconds reduction, having discovered that their fibres will resist igniting for that period of time, but not for 20. The OPSS has banged on for years now about how they will not replace the existing open flame standard with one that is less stringent. The fact they now plan to do so indicates that they have finally twigged that they painted themselves into a corner over this.
 
2.         EN 1021 has some of the same key faults in common with BS 5852. For example, it does not cater for flammable materials close to the cover but not within the main body of say a sofa like the arms (the test rig is in effect two large furniture cushions, meaning that in practice cover material near the arms will ignite because items beneath and close to the cover do not have sufficient foam to protect against catching fire). And the fact that flame retardants wear off of fabrics easily means they will not comply with ignition tests soon after purchase in both test scenarios. 
 
3.         EN 1021 still leads to large volumes of flame retardants in furniture – e.g. some of the worst kinds, like the brominated varieties – in cover fabrics. The OPSS is supposed to be committed to reducing FRs in furniture. 
 
4.         The government itself proved in 2014/2015 that the open flame test in BS 5852 is not effective in practice; it does not prevent ignition. In 2014 it came up with a new open flame test that was effective and also would hugely reduce FRs in cover fabrics. Why therefore is the OPSS not using this to replace the existing test?
 
To summarise (if possible!): in 2014, the government proved that the UK match/open flame test is not effective and proposed a new test that was. From that point on, it delayed making changes, keeping in place a test that does not work and leads to millions of kgs of toxic flame retardants in UK furniture. In 2019, the Environmental Audit Committee recommended that the OPSS drop the open flame and fillings tests altogether. But instead, for the next five years the government created an impasse by setting up British Standards Institute to do the impossible: replace the existing open flame test (which does not work) with one that is just as stringent. BSI could not do so because no such standard exists or is possible to draft. Under pressure, the OPSS went out to consultation late last year on new regulations. It said these will be ready by October 2024 (they won't be). It intimated that the new standards to support the regulations would be ready about the same time. However, BSI told the government (but not the public of course) that it would be at least 2028 before new standards were ready. And that depended on the OPSS telling them what standards they wanted. Which they did not, and could not, do. Now, they are trying to rush through a EN standard equivalent even though:

• They could have done so ten years ago, if that was the answer, which it clearly isn't.
• The EN standard suffers many of the same faults at the current British standard, i.e. it is not effective in practice.
• The government knows that no EU country uses EN 1021 open flame test anyway, one reason being that they do not want large volumes of flame retardants in their furniture.

 
Not one person on FW/6 has made a stand over this, content for a mixture of reasons, most of them financial, to go along with this extended madness that results only in mass cancers and other illnesses in UK citizens, including babies and firefighters.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
The furniture fire safety regulations have become a Gordian knot in which different strands tighten in on each other making the chances of ever unravelling it near to impossible. The confusion is added to by the fact that hardly anyone involved understands even their own part in it. Each strand is ambiguous and impossible to fully understand because of all the unknown factors that contribute to it. This produces contradictions such as abound in a recent UCLAN paper, but it seems even the authors are unaware of them; they're just looking to profit in various ways from the fact that the OPSS seems determined to keep flame retardants in UK furniture (because they are so profitable).
 
Such a knot suits the bad guys because they benefit from it remaining tied. Every time someone with good intentions tries to untie even a piece of it, the bad guys simply point to another bit of it and claim that that answers the question.
 
Having said that, I believe the following can be said about the Regs with a fair degree of certainty:
 
1. They are largely ineffective where fire safety is concerned, as confirmed by a government select committee in 2019 after a thorough investigation.
 
2. They lead to large amounts of flame retardants in UK furniture (though the types and amounts are hard to pin down), including banned chemicals such as DecaBDE. There is no evidence that these FRs contribute positively to a furniture fire but we do know they make it much more toxic. FRs also leach out of furniture and get into people causing all kinds of health problems. These problems should be used to off-set any advantage gained from the regs, but they are not.
 
3. There is no evidence that the regs save lives from fire and there is plenty of evidence from around the world that an absence of flame retardants makes no difference to the number of fire deaths.
 
4. The OPSS is cagey over actual stats but it seems that about 60 fire deaths a year result from fires starting in bedrooms or living rooms (where these regulated furniture products are mostly found). Also that most fire deaths occur in the elderly. We don't know exactly, but we must put at least some of those lives saved down to the increase in smoke alarms and decrease in smoking. If we ascribe say 33% to each, then the maximum lives saved by the regs is about 40. And that's if they actually worked. Which has to be set against the massive toxicity from flame retardants when they burn.
 
5. The OPSS states that smoke toxicity is the largest cause of death in fires but do not provide figures. Therefore, allowance has to be made for the possibility that more deaths are caused by the fact that flame retardants increase toxicity. And that's without mentioning the many illnesses caused by flame retardants in fires that are not even recorded.
 
6. On balance, then, even assuming all the 60 lives saved were from furniture fires (which is not the case, e.g. fires also start in TVs, carpets, curtains, bedding etc), the additional deaths caused by toxic FR inhalation probably balance out such a benefit. In other words, even if the regs were effective, it's reasonable to conclude that ditching them would make no net difference to lives saved, this being born out by the fact that the rest of the world has no such regs yet the drop in furniture fire deaths in recent years is the same as in the UK.

Dear Richard,
 
Elsewhere on this site I've posted my notes on the extraordinary (for all the wrong reasons) "stakeholder engagement" meeting you co-hosted with Sean Valoo on 18th September 2023. To remind readers, this was intended to be, the OPSS had said, an open discussion with stakeholders about the consultation proposals and a chance to have our questions answered. I and others thought, how on earth would they answer all these people's questions (around 80 names were on the copy list) in a 90 mins meeting?

For the record, this was the first full stakeholder meeting held by the government since a two-venue meeting in 2020 (London and Birmingham) which they blocked me from entering (which was why I was a little suspicious to have been invited to this one). And the previous full stakeholder meeting before that had been as far back as August 2015. So just three in 8 years on a subject of incredible importance for the health of the UK population.

As you know, Richard, this meeting was different in two ways. First, it was virtual only and second there was no way for any stakeholder to actually "engage" with it. We could not speak to you, and even the chat function was switched off. Instead we had you and Sean reading out the entire consultation document, which took an hour, despite the fact that everyone on the call had obviously already read it. Then you announced you were going to answer all our questions that we'd sent in for the meeting. Oh, but to help smooth the process, you had sorted the questions into themes; and it was these themes you would actually "answer". I'd put in some very detailed questions, as you'd no doubt expected, but oddly enough they didn't fit into any of your themes, so I didn't get any answers. I wasn't the only one.

I won't go into the details of this Q&A. Let's just say that nothing of any real meat was dealt with. There was one exception and the fact you Richard raised it suggested you really did need to deal with it: our old friend, smoke toxicity. I'm sure you were aware that at this time, the press was writing about high levels of cancers in firefighters, caused by smoke toxicity, and the FBU had just announced that it was going to tackle legislation that leads to flame retardants poisoning firefighters. 
The following exchange has been transcribed from the audio recording of this meeting made by the OPSS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkZsL_v0vnk
 
OPSS official: ". . . another question -  about why are we not addressing smoke toxicity through the New Approach?
          
Jude: Yes, that's a challenging one. The key is, and the starting place in the New Approach, is . . . much of the 1988 regulations is about preventing ignition rather than reflecting and assessing risk post-ignition. And that's the approach we've agreed with senior colleagues and senior stakeholders like fire chiefs; that's the reason we're going down that approach and if we were to completely re-write the rule book it would pose a very long challenge, I think.
 
Let's pause here. I've been a leading expert on these regulations for over ten years, having regular contact with everyone that has a stake in them. Never once have I heard it suggested that "much of the regulations is about preventing ignition rather than reflecting and assessing risk post-ignition". I'm calling you out on this, Richard. Why did you make this clearly false statement about a key subject in fire deaths? Who put you up to it or did you think of it yourself? The sentence that follows is also clearly false since "senior colleagues and senior stakeholders like fire chiefs" could not possibly agree with your premise. But if they have in fact since agreed, then you need to produce evidence that they have: names and statements. But that's not your way, is it? Your way is to lie about key issues, linked to false conflations, all designed to get you personally (and your Department) off the hook, and to hell with fire toxicity that in just about every home fire in the UK is majorly caused by furniture full of flame retardants. To continue:
 
Valoo: Yeah, and I think you know there's appetite amongst us all to deliver a New Approach as soon as possible and I think that taking on the challenge of regulating for smoke toxicity would have delayed us being able to put forward proposals for a New Approach somewhat. 
 
The New Approach does not really exist, of course. And it's not new anyway. In the past, safety laws on the whole were prescriptive, like the furniture regs: they told you exactly what to do to be compliant. Then a different approach came in to EU (and therefore to the UK) safety legislation – also called New Approach - which was less prescriptive laws, like the General Product Safety Directive which pretty much just says that products must be "safe". It's up to the producer to discover what "safe" means, what standards should be applied and so on. Certain, shall we say, profit-minded fire safety big shots were also behind the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, governing the fire safety of non-domestic environments, including upholstered furniture. Again, in order to comply, the "responsible person" has to demonstrate that their premises and products are "safe". And, believe it or not, it's up to them to decide what that means. This replaced legislation that was much more prescriptive. The so-called new "New Approach" is trying to pull the same switcheroo with domestic furniture fire safety. To continue:
 
[Valoo] But, as Richard said, it is something we are considering and many of you raised [this] as an issue; and it's also something we're discussing with colleagues in [inaudible – Delup?] 
 
I think Sean Valoo is referring here to the Department for Levelling Up and this report by them: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6440f2596dda69000d11e15e/Independent_Review_of_the_Construction_Product_Testing_Regime.pdf
 
[Valoo] who have begun a project looking into the smoke toxicity of construction products, and that is a project that fell out of the Grenfell Inquiry, and so we're liaising with them to understand how we can adopt, and do some of what they're doing in that space in terms of, well, products more generally but also in terms of product [inaudible] fire safety.
 
Jude: And I guess the toxicity risk, as well as [kind of listening to the outputs from Delup there?], um, the new framework that our colleagues in the product safety review team are considering – they're looking to kind of consider hazards [inaudible] across different products, so if there is evidence that supports general requirements across certain sectors in relation to smoke toxicity, I'd encourage stakeholders to respond to that consultation as well but that in terms of general requirements that can be put in place across right across the framework, but also in the way we regulate upholstered furniture.
 
You might here be referring to this consultation:          https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-the-new-safety-regime-for-occupied-higher-risk-buildings/consultation-on-the-new-safety-regime-for-occupied-higher-risk-buildings But if so, I'm not sure why since it closed quite some time back and the government responded in Oct 2023. You appear to be saying that smoke toxicity occurs in all sorts of products and Levelling Up is looking at that therefore contact them and not us. The fact that in a home fire, the vast majority of smoke toxicity including the production of hydrogen cyanide comes from burning furniture is something that according to you doesn't concern the OPSS anyway because your regulations are only responsible for pre-ignition issues.

The "engagement" meeting closed soon after this exchange, with you Richard saying, "I think that gives a very good flavour of the questions you've been asking and thank you very much for joining us this morning. I think this has been a very productive session, from our perspective [!] . . . we hope it was useful."

On the surface, the above exchange actually encapsulates all that's wrong with how the government is dealing with what remains a massive scandal regarding public health and the truth about the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy. As I'm sure you're well aware, Richard: at least I can't think of any other reason why you would try and tell the world your department has no responsibility for smoke toxicity in home fires.

I had to keep re-listening to the recording to try to even hear what you were actually saying. Is this confusion deliberate? Well, I don't think it's conscious, as your relaxed body language indicates. It's actually I think more the result of a semi-deliberate policy of spreading one's true intent around several apparently related (but not really) issues, institutions and ideas in order to prevent anyone focussing on the real problem and, more importantly, who's responsible for it. And using the term "Delup" without explaining that this is a slang term for another government department (assuming that it is), suggests you're trying to hide something. At the very least it's disrespectful to your stakeholders.

In summary, I do not believe your claim about smoke toxicity not being your responsibility was a casual statement. You are trying to say that the regs, and your department, are not responsible for smoke toxicity, at Grenfell or anywhere else, because that is all a "post-ignition" matter.
As said, your claims that this approach has been agreed with senior colleagues is of course unverified: you don't say who they are exactly; it could mean only OPSS senior colleagues. Nor do you say where the notes of these discussions can be found. You just say it's been agreed "[with] senior stakeholders like the fire chiefs". 

During this consultation process and in the consultation document itself (page 21) OPSS has been leaning rather heavily on the NFCC to justify their decision to keep an open flame test in the regs; this for example from your consultation proposals:
 
The development of the proposed scope has been supported by research commissioned by the Office for Product Safety and Standards and carried out by research consortia consisting of UCLan, Birmingham University, Oakdene Hollins, and WhaleyResearch. The peer-reviewed Fire Risks of Upholstered Products research and subsequent discussions with the representatives of the London Fire Brigade and National Fire Chiefs Council have considered the extent of the fire safety risk posed by products while also reflecting their foreseeable use and the potential exposure of users to chemical flame retardants.
 
Note, however, that there is no mention here of any direct conversations between the NFCC and the OPSS. So when you Richard say you've "agreed with", you really mean that the OPSS commissioned some research which the NFCC was asked to contribute to (but not the FBU, nor the EAC, nor anyone in fact who might be opposed to the continuation of flame retardants in UK furniture). 
Stakeholders have written asking for the names of the people in the NFCC claiming this and some evidence of the research to back it up. As usual when faced with awkward questions, however, the OPSS did not reply.
​
I won't continue for now. The purpose of this letter is to put questions to you, Richard, as a member of the OPSS team responsible for the furniture regulations. You almost certainly won't respond, mainly because we both know you can't, not without lying further at any rate. My experience with officials like you is you have the enviable ability to convince yourself that you're right, even when all evidence and facts say you're not. This is a very convenient ability to possess since it allows you to side-step any conscience you may still possess. The fact is, however, that you Richard are acting directly against the public good and are responsible, personally, for ensuring that every person, and in particular children and firefighters, in this country will continue to be poisoned in their own homes for many years to come. I hope whatever rewards and promotions you receive in the civil service are worth it.
 
Regards,
 
Terry Edge