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.
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