I am looking at a fat folder of notes from and about meetings that took place between the Department for Business and a very wide range of stakeholders towards reviewing the Furniture Regulations. They cover a period of 18 months from around December 2010 to June 2011. There are masses of details and suggestions from experts on every aspect of furniture fire safety. They cover many meetings of the main Advisory Group and three sub-groups looking at Traceability, Testing and Definitions. 
 
In his Introduction to the 7 December 2010 meeting of the Advisory Group, Mitchell Leimon (head of the Product Safety Team, now the OPSS, at BIS) said:
 
"BIS is very keen that this review is a collaborative and open process". And a glance at all these notes confirms that it was indeed. For some years now, however, there has been virtually no collaboration on the furniture regulations. And the new proposals from the OPSS have been largely invented by them at the last moment with little to no reference to any of this good work done so long ago. For example, this meeting note then lists points made so far by the Group (see photo above).
 
Fourteen years on and NONE of these points has been dealt with, and are mostly not dealt with at all by the new OPSS consultation proposals (although including outdoor furniture fully in scope has now been proposed). 
 
Many of them appear to have completely escaped the OPSS's notice, like "Harmonise test house practices in applying the FFRs' test requirements". In fact the practice continues of furniture manufacturers simply trawling around the test houses, gathering 'fail's until they hit one that scores a 'pass'. The OPSS knows – or rather it should know – that the Food Standards Agency has the power to make test houses give up their logs of tests made in order that they can discover which companies are cheating in this way. 
 
As for "Capture the knowledge of the FFRs while it still exists" – well, I'm quoting here from knowledge that I'm fairly certain has not been capture by the OPSS; buried alive more like! 
 
The point is that many of the people and organisations involved in these meetings are still involved today. So, why aren't they protesting about the incredible lack of progress made since 2011? Why aren't they objecting to all that time and effort they wasted informing the government of what should be changed in the regs? 
 
Well, unfortunately, the OPSS can get away with this because manufacturers and retailers are terrified that if they object, then it will be made apparent to the public that they have knowingly done nothing about preventing customers being poisoned in their own homes at least since 2014 when the government proved the regulations are not effective. 
 
Why does the OPSS want to continue backing safety measures it knows do nothing but poison customers and make fires more toxic? Because the number one motive of civil servants, individually and collectively, is to cover one's back. These new proposals guarantee further long delays by which time all involved at the OPSS in these regulations will have moved on to other jobs and therefore out of the firing line.
 
As for all this knowledge that has been ignored: well, either the OPSS is in possession of it or it isn't. If the former, then why aren't they sharing it all with the world? If the latter, why aren't they asking if anyone has copies that they can add to the current review? The fact is, it's unlikely they have copies for two reasons: first, for many years electronic files at the Department for Business were/are badly stored and/or lost, therefore in effect unrecoverable; second, for the past nine years or so a culture has developed in government and the civil service of not keeping notes and records. Why this is the case should be obvious by now.

1st October 2022 Update
 
The utter hoplessness of the situation summed up by:
 
Recently, the Environment Agency issued a letter to all local authorities with the directive that with immediate effect they must safely dispose of upholstered domestic seating at end-life containing Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).
 
Covering article:  
https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/waste-sofas-must-be-incinerated-pops-ea/

Letter:
https://www.letsrecycle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Environment-Agency-POPs-letter.pdf
 
There are many, many questionable elements to this letter but by far the biggest one is contained in the title of and this quote from the letter:
 
Waste Upholstered Domestic Seating 

If an item of domestic seating waste is upholstered you should assume that it contains POPs, and manage it as a POPs waste, unless you can demonstrate that it does not contain POPs. Further information can be found in the section on identification and separation of items containing POPs. 

The following items are not considered ‘domestic seating’ for the purposes of this letter (my emphasis): 

• - Items that are not upholstered (for example a wooden chair without a cushioned or textile back, seat, or arms). These should not contain POPs. 
• -  Deckchairs, mattresses, curtains, blinds, and beds 
• -  Wastes from the manufacture of new domestic seating that are known not to contain POPs 

1) Why only seating? The POPs legislation and the Stockholm convention make no such distinction. For POPs/flame retardants purposes mattresses are identical to sofas; indeed there will be more POPs in a typical mattress to a typical sofa. 

2) Why are mattresses exempt? Okay, yes, they're not seating as such but entitling this letter "Waste Upholstered Domestic Seating" was suspicious in the first place.

Well, without going into all the details, let's just say that in private, both the National Bed Federation and the Environment Agency, gave the same ludicrous answer: that the EA had only been able to get around to researching sofas; mattresses will come later. But as I pointed out at a talk to furniture producers at SATRA recently, first the EA should not have issued this letter until both the main sources of POPs waste had been "researched"; second, mattress producers have been given carte blanche to dispose of products at end-life any old way they want to. Which has long been the goal of the National Bed Federation of course. 

This kind of collusion between industry and government is now rife in the UK, and always towards what suits industry's purposes (which is profit first, last and always). 

Incidentally, in its letter the EA lists the kinds of POPs typically found in upholstered waste, with DecaBDE the "most common". But what it neglects to inform us is that DecaBDE was banned a few years ago for being toxic. Yet here is the government, not only doing nothing about the millions of mattresses and sofas in UK homes that contain DecaBDE in large volumes, it's now given the go-ahead for Deca in millions of mattresses to be thrown into landfill or recycled into other household products that in turn will get back into us. 

The greens are colluding with this. Recently, they sent round an email about this letter looking at the chemicals involved but managing somehow to miss the key problem issue: mattresses. Why? Well, this is typical of most green groups: they campaign for changes but always within a safety ceiling that guarantees they preserve their reputation as environmental campaigners, and, even more crucially keeps them in work. In short, they might as well be doing the work of industry: keeping public focus on the smaller problems so they can get away with the really big ones.

In other news, the OPSS continues to ensure that nothing is going to change regarding the furniture regulations. They are currently mumbling about issuing "new regulations" at the end of this summer (well . . . ) or sometime next year. What they mean by "regulations" is a consultation on very general "essential safety requirements" that they've cooked up. There are not standards to back them up and unlikely to be for some years to come, if ever. In the meantime, the OPSS will be sure to inform everyone that they must continue to use the current standards. The ones the government itself proved don't work – eight years ago.

I haven't added much information to this website, or blogged on it, for several months. There are two main reasons for this. 
 
First, I think the site contains just about all the information anyone could need to understand that there exists an ongoing scandal based on the fact that our upholstered furniture is not only not fire-safe, as we are led to believe, but is also highly toxic, both in its normal state and especially if it catches fire. 
 
Second, there are various attempts to put this situation right taking place but which cannot be openly discussed at the moment, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Within this, there are confidences I must keep with some of the people I'm working with.
 
However, if you have any specific questions about this issue, or information you'd like me to receive, feel free to get in touch via the Contact page.
 
Finally, I'd like to thank the British Standards Institute for offering me a place on their committe, FW/6 – Flammability performance and fire tests for furniture. This is the working committee that has been tasked with producing new flammability standards for the government's review of the furniture and furnishings fire safety regulations. When working for the government I was a member of FW/6 (for about 15 years until I retired from the civil service in March 2016) and learnt a fantastic amount from the experts in testing and making standards on the committee and am looking forward to working with them again. I believe my appointment demonstrates that BSI is committed to ensuring its committees represent a wide range of views and expertise.

 

 
 
 
 

From the Daily Mail today:

Conflict of interest row as it emerges Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance has £600,000 of shares in vaccine maker contracted to make UK's coronavirus jabs

Article here.

See my previous blog post for info on Sir Pat's connections with the chemical industry. His mate, Sir Alan Penn, is also a Chief Scientific Advisor and fellow SAGE member. See my Grenfell Tower Fire page for information on how Penn has been blocking inquiries into the role flame retardants played in the Grenfell fire. 

I work with a lot of people who are trying to get the government to do the right thing by way of the environment and public health, across a variety of government departments. They have all found the same corrupt systems in place, whereby scientific advisors are being well rewarded for ensuring that government policies and laws support business needs. 

Similarly, it won't surprise anyone to learn that Sir Ken Knight has just been appointed Chair of a new committee comprising the Chairs of all relevant committees at the British Standards Institute which will have overall say on fire safety standards, including Grenfell. This followed me and colleagues exposing the Department of Business's intention to set up a panel of "experts" to control the future of the Furniture Regulations comprised almost entirely of flame retardant supporters. They've clearly "upped" this function to the new BSI committee where Sir Ken - long-time paid puppet of the FR industry - can ensure that nothing changes.

Sir Pat has not of course been punished in any way for this clear conflict of interests, despite Matt Hancock declaring that he knew nothing about it until he saw it in the papers. So it goes.