On 2 August 2023, the Office for Product Safety and Standards launched a new consultation on proposed changes (such as they are) for the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. To run alongside it, we are launching:
 
 
THE CAMPAIGN FOR SAFE FURNITURE
 
The situation:
 
Every person in the UK is being poisoned in their own homes - contracting cancers, respiratory diseases, thyroid illnesses and more, with children particularly vulnerable - because they contain the world's highest levels of toxic flame retardant chemicals, mostly in our furniture, employed to comply with the UK's tough furniture fire safety laws which the government itself proved nine years ago do not even work! 
 
This campaign is to help bring about non-toxic upholstered furniture that provides the same fire safety the rest of the world enjoys and which will bring and end to citizens and firefighters suffering cancers at rates way above normal.
 
What you can do:
 
The Office for Product Safety and Standards has just gone out to consultation - for the third time! - on their proposals for new furniture fire safety standards. They say they want to hear from you, and the public can in fact make all the difference. When first California then the rest of the USA wanted to change its furniture fire standards for the better, getting rid of all toxic flame retardants, there were literally hundreds of comments of support by the public sent in to the consultation. By contrast, the previous two UK consultations received no public responses at all. This is no one's fault, since the public has been largely kept in the dark about this massive scandal. But now is your chance to make a difference, because if the OPSS receives hundreds, even dozens of complaints, believe me it will be forced to act finally in the public interest.
 
The consultation and ways to respond to it can be found here. I recommend simply writing your response direct in an email to the address provided. Otherwise you will have to go through their entire series of questions which is time-consuming and confusing because frankly no one, least of all the OPSS, understands what's behind all of their and confusing specific questions. Keep it simple!
 
Obviously, you need to understand what you are saying in your response. However, time is short and the OPSS has shown many signs that it intends to go ahead with its proposals whatever anyone says; therefore, it's vital that we respond in numbers on key points. There is plenty of information on this blog to guide you, including the site page "OPSS's 2013 consultation".
 
Here are a few suggested points you might make:
 

• These new proposals will do nothing about the fact the current regulations are not fit for purpose and just make our furniture more toxic with high levels of flame retardant chemicals, both wearing off into our homes and by making home fires much more toxic, e.g. full of hydrogen cyanide fumes that are deadly. Please, therefore, implement the recommendations of the Environmental Audit Committee in 2019, to follow the rest of the world in providing just a cigarette/smoulder test which will eliminate flame retardants from our furniture.

 

• Also as recommended by the Environmental Audit Committee, please take children's mattresses and other child upholstered products out of scope of these regulations immediately, as the USA has done with its furniture flammability requirements.

 

• Please also follow the lead of the USA and ban flame retardants from upholstered furniture products.

 

 
 
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.