MY NOTES ON THE OPSS'S 2023 CONSULTATION PROPOSALS FOR THE FURNITURE REGULATIONS
The consultation documents can be found here.
First, here is an email I sent to the Sean Valoo and Richard Jude of the OPSS after their "stakeholder engagement" virtual meeting on 18th September. I received out of office responses from Valoo and Jude, saying they were on leave until 2nd October, i.e. they had both vacated themselves after a contentious meeting at a very important time. I subsequently discovered that their boss, Tony Thomas, who was partially at the meeting, quit the Department a few days following it! I sent a reminder to Valoo and Jude but as of 8 October have still received no reply to them. The questions in this email were sent by me to the OPSS in advance of the meeting, since they'd asked for them in advance, giving the clear impression there would be an open debate around them. It may not surprise you to learn that none of my questions were considered in the meeting.
They knew that I'd copied in around 80 stakeholders to my email so I can only assume they do not want to have to admit they can't answer my questions.
I believe this email provides a lot of useful information and areas of conflict about this consultation. If you do not understand anything, please contact me via the Contact page. After the email, I've made some further notes that may be useful.
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Terry <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Date: 24/09/2023 17:17
Subject: Furniture Regs Consultation, stakeholder engagement meeting 18 September 2023
Dear Sean and Richard,
Below are some comments and questions regarding the Teams meeting on Monday 18 September. I have copied this extensively.
Stakeholder engagement
For the first few years of the current review of the FFRs, starting in 2010, stakeholders were frequently and openly engaged in many different forms, from large meetings to personal get-togethers. Agendas were issued before meetings then adjusted according to stakeholder feed-back. Meetings were open to all and during them stakeholders presented points of concern which were then discussed. A meeting note was circulated after each meeting/event, inviting comments from stakeholders. These were incorporated into the final note. The officials leading on the FFRs provided their names and phone numbers to all and were happy to take and respond to phone/email enquiries without censure.
For the record, this is only the second open stakeholder meeting about the FFRs in the past 7 years and the first for three and a half years. This, despite the importance of, confusion over and unresolved issues behind these regulations.
Why has this policy changed at the OPSS? For example, I am having to write to you now because at your "stakeholder engagement" Teams meeting on 18 September there was no opportunity to actually engage with you; no way to ask questions, and the chat function was de-activated. The short Q&A session at the end dealt only with questions pre-selected by you.
As none of my (and colleagues') questions were included in your Q&A session and given you indicated that they would not necessarily be answered at all (you said you'd later deal instead with the "themes" behind the questions), we would very much appreciate answers to the questions below by return, please.
Open flame/match test
A) Why don't your proposals reflect the Environmental Audit Committee's recommendations of 2019, i.e. that the UK government needs to drop the open flame/match and fillings tests and retain just a cigarette test (thereby ridding UK furniture of flame retardants)? What evidence have you discovered to suggest the EAC was wrong in this recommendation? If it exists, why wasn't it shared? Why are you apparently ignoring the following additional supporting evidence for dropping the open flame test:
All you cite as "evidence" for keeping an open flame test is that unnamed persons on the National Fire Chiefs Council and in the London Fire Brigade told you they want one. Who are they and where is their evidence to off-set the vast evidence (including your own) that an open flame test is not required?
B) Why aren't you in any case proposing the open flame/match test you put forward in 2014 and again in 2016, given that there has been no evidenced objections to it? What have you learned since that convinces you it would not be effective now?
Timing
Fire toxicity
You will be aware of the 2017 paper produced by Professors Richard Hull and Anna Stec (and others) with the self-explanatory title:
"Flame retardants in UK furniture increase smoke toxicity more than they reduce fire growth[1]"
And Professor David Purser's report[2] on fire toxicity to the Grenfell Inquiry which describes how furniture catching fire in the Tower made the blaze more toxic, e.g:
"Materials with a high nitrogen content (including the polyurethane foam [PUR] and acrylic covers of upholstered furniture, and the polyisocyanurate [PIN foam in the Grenfell insulation] produce toxic nitrogen oxides when during well-ventilated combustion and high yields of hydrogen cyanide during under-ventilated combustion."
Both these reports refer to toxic fumes emanating from furniture which complies with the FFRs, leading to deaths and cancers. This is a very serious matter, as I'm sure you're aware. A few years ago, in response to a FOI request asking how much communication the OPSS had had with the Grenfell Inquiry about the regulations, you said "None."
Can you please confirm that you believe you do not have responsibility for what occurs post-ignition with furniture; or instead confirm that you will now be contacting the Grenfell Inquiry to inform them that domestic upholstered furniture is a major cause of fire toxicity and that you are willing to provide them with further information to that end?
If you still believe you do not have responsibility for post-ignition toxicity in furniture, please inform us who does.
I have several other questions (headlined below) and would be happy to meet with you to discuss them. They are based on meetings with experts and material which I do not believe you have access to. I would be very happy to share this information with you. In person.
Other questions – headline points
Enforcement
Trading Standards have not been able to enforce the fire tests within the FFRs since 2014 because, as they informed you that year, the regulations do not work in practice. How will they enforce new regulations that are voluntary?
Child products
Why do your proposals for child products not include child mattresses (above cot mattress size), especially given that the USA has removed all child products from scope of furniture fire safety requirements and the EAC recommended you do the same?
Wear
You know that the subject of wear was discussed at length by a representative group of stakeholders recently (you have seen the meeting note) and the majority view was that given flame retardants have been proven to wear off furniture considerably and soon after entering the home, wear testing should be undertaken to ascertain at what point furniture becomes non-compliant and thereby potentially rendering the regulations redundant. What have you done about this and if nothing, why not? Similarly, why are you keeping second hand furniture in scope knowing that the wear issue alone means that in the majority of cases furniture cannot possibly be fire-safe?
Mattresses
There is wide-scale agreement (even from representatives of the flame retardant industry, e.g. Bob Graham) and evidence (see YouTube videos by UK fire services, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezJ6SorlpJo) that the fire resistance requirements for mattresses in the regulations (and BS 7177) do not have any effect in preventing ignition or fire spread, simply because bedding catches fire first and overwhelms the ignition and crib 5 tests. Why therefore are you still proposing fire tests for mattresses in this consultation?
Similarly, you claimed on 18 September that while the ignition tests protect fillings from fire, a fillings test was still necessary because the covers may wear, be weakened by washing etc. However, as with mattresses, if cover fabric catches fire, the resulting flames will easily overcome the crib 5 requirements for fillings; therefore why does this not demonstrate there is no point in fire requirements for fillings?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29324384/
2https://assets.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/documents/Professor%20David%20Purser%20report%20%28Phase%201%20-%20supplemental%29%20DAPR0000001.pdf
Yours sincerely,
Terry Edge
Some more detailed notes on the consultation
I'm going to start this piece by looking at a fact that is little known but drives much of the conflict around fire safety vs chemical risk. To a degree, it's a note of sympathy for the position that the OPSS finds itself in, albeit it does not seem very concerned to do anything about it.
In short, it's about how the toxicity of home fires has hugely increased over the past 50 or 60 years. Even up to the 60s and 70s, UK homes actually contained few hugely combustible materials. I remember my own house in Essex which typically had stone floors, a few small rugs and sofas that were mostly wooden structures with small thin cushions on them. Any fire therefore would be slow to reach what's known as "flashover" - the point where the fire is so intense that there is a near-simultaneous ignition of just about every surface in the room. Modern homes of course are packed with highly flammable materials in large volumes: sofas, mattresses, cushions; also curtains, thick carpets, large televisions and so on. Although conditions vary - size of room, the degree of ventilation and so on - on average the time to flashover has shrunk by around 10 times for a modern room, to just a few minutes in many cases.
If you want an example of this here is an example, a fire services video showing what happens when a typical bedroom catches fire, i.e. flashover is reached in little over two minutes. Please note that the mattress concerned is UK-compliant, i.e. will be full of flame retardant chemicals. The FR industry used to claim that their products provided 14 mins escape time. In 2019, when testifying to the Environmental Audit Committee, they changed this to 4 mins. They'd never proved 14 mins, and judging by this example would have a hard time justifying 4 minutes too.
Naturally, you would want the time to escape a burning room before flashover occurs. But the fact in a modern house, you don't. Fortunately, most people are not at risk from a fire starting quickly in a sofa (which the open flame test replicates) simply because you will either see it and put it out, or run out of the house. If you are in say the kitchen then the fire alarm will go off giving you time to quit the house. One of the reasons the EAC recommending keeping a cigarette test (as do Europe and the USA) is because of the scenario of dropping one on your sofa, then going to sleep upstairs. The sofa might not catch fire for an hour, then you might be trapped upstairs with toxic fumes rising. As for mattresses, as in my email above, there is no point at all in having fire resistance requirements for mattresses anyway.
The consultation
The Office for Product Safety and Standards has just gone out, for the third time, to consultation on its plans for the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. The previous two, in 2014 and 2016 are however still hanging in limbo, unactioned by the government.
This consultation is a scam because the OPSS has already decided on the outcome, and pretty much admitted it at the 18 September "stakeholder engagement" meeting. For example, they have just commissioned and funded the British Standards Institute to produce new Standards, even before the consultation ends!
Which wouldn't be so bad if the proposals they're making would lead to fire-safe furniture free from flame retardant chemicals. But they won't: they are intended to pretty much maintain the current situation, i.e. sofas and mattresses which do not prevent or resist fire, stuffed with toxic chemicals that do nothing but make home fires more toxic.
Why would they want to do such a thing? I think there are two main reasons.
1) They are getting in line with general government policy which is to put the economy before public health and safety, and the environment. At the Grenfell Inquiry, for example, civil servants from the Dept. for Levelling Up actually stated that if they put fire safety first, the public would starve. Don't believe me? Here's the actual exchange in question:
“What would be wrong with letting somebody… who had life safety as their absolute priority craft the regulation?” Millett (Inquiry solicitor) asked.
"The country would be bankrupt,” Martin (Levelling Up civil servant) said. “We’d all starve to death, ultimately, I suppose, if you took it to its extreme … That’s the policy conundrum governments are faced with … you need to balance the cost of regulation with its benefits.”
“So death by fire or death by starvation and that’s for the government to choose between?” said Millett.
And here's what the OPSS says in its new consultation document:
"This consultation forms part of the Smarter Regulation programme of regulatory reform announcements, that began in May with publication of Smarter Regulation to Grow the Economy. Smarter regulation is about improving regulation across the board, ensuring it is as clear as possible and only used where necessary and proportionate. Through this consultation and further regulatory reform updates, the Government will take action to reduce the burdens on business; reduce the cost of living; deliver choice to consumers; turbocharge science and innovation and drive infrastructure development."
Ring a bell? The OPSS (the office for Product Safety!) wants to "reduce the burdens on business" and wants to use regulations only "where necessary and proportionate". Note there is no mention at all of providing fire safety. Those civil servants at the Grenfell Inquiry were pretty clear that they had in effect chosen to facilitate a fire in which 72 people died a terrible death. So perhaps it's no great surprise the the OPSS is now proposing de-regulatory measures that will poison millions of us and cause thousands of cancers and deaths.
As for the claim that their proposals will "turbocharge science and innovation", a colleague at IKEA once told me that the last innovation in furniture-making was the staple gun. Furniture is not complicated science-wise: it's just padded stuff that you sit or sleep on. But of course this is all part of the smarter regulation spiel. As for the truth behind the drive to de-regulate, to "reduce the burdens on business", the OPSS seems to have forgotten the disaster that was The Red Tape Challenge. This was launched by the government to a lot of publicity in 2011. The aim was to do away with cumbersome safety legislation that got in the way of industry turbocharging its way to saving us all from starvation. We civil servants were told that a website would be set up where members of the public could object to regulations. If any set of regs received 200 or more "No"s from the public then it would be axed. Unfortunately for the government, the safety regs it targeted only got a few comments from the public and most of those were along the lines of "Er, don't we need fire safety laws to protect [for example] children's nightdresses?". Undeterred by public opinion the government then changed the rules and simply ruled that a whole set of safety regs were going to be cut regardless.
One set was the furniture regs. At this time, I and most people believed they worked and were highly successful at saving lives. Ironically, after a year's hard graft, I managed to persuade the Cabinet Office that the changes we were planning to make to the regs amounted to de-regulation, in that industry would save around £50m a year from greatly reduced expensive flame retardants not required for the new open flame test. The regs were saved!
Incidentally, while researching my book, I discovered that the government has removed the official Red Tape Challenge from the internet. I wonder why?
What the OPSS is actually consulting on now is not clear. The title of the main paper is: "Smarter Regulation:
Consultation on the new approach to the fire safety of domestic upholstered furniture". Is it, then a consultation on proposals for the furniture regs or just an approach to new proposals? I believe this is deliberately confusing because of the massive contradiction behind the proposals that the OPSS would rather you didn't dwell on. For example, in the Minister's Foreword he/OPSS officials state:
"The Government is clear that upholstered furniture placed on the market in the UK must be fire safe to protect consumers in their homes. The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 have reduced deaths by fire and are recognised and recommended internationally as a gold standard for furniture fire safety to this day."
(See my blog for 23 August 2023.)
The truth is that there is no evidence at all that the FFRs save lives (and none is produced in this document). This is partly because it's not possible to say a life was saved from a home fire; it's only possible to show how deaths in home fires have reduced over the years. Because we used to believe the regulations worked, research was commissioned and the researcher (funded by the flame retardant industry) simply guessed what proportion of those reduced deaths were because of the regs. And because the statistical reports were made on the assumption that the regs worked, and we now know they don't, no estimations are valid. Indeed, as the Chair of the EAC pointed out, New Zealand shows near identical reduction in furniture fire deaths as the UK, yet they have no fires safety regulations for furniture and no flame retardants.
As for, "[the FFRs] are recognised and recommended internationally as a gold standard for furniture fire safety to this day", it's no accident that no references are provided. Because the only people who make the same lie are those working for the flame retardant industry.
The consultation includes a set of draft regulations. Which is extraordinary: we go from the vague proposals of the "essential safety requirements" which the OPSS apparently wants the new regs to be based on, to a very specific (but hugely incomplete) set of directions for things like measurements for what constitutes a scatter cushion and what constitutes a floor cushion. The difference is important since currently a floor cushion requires all three tests to be passed, while a scatter cushion only has to have its fillings passed. I worked on this point (and others) with stakeholders for year without a consensus being reached. Now, the OPSS has simply decided on the spur of the moment which is which and without any consultation. Why have they done this? I suspect for two reasons. First, without these draft regulations, the entire exercise would be conspicuously on the thin side: just a few vague essential safety requirements that are undefined. Not much return for what is now 14 years of review. Also, they know full well that in providing specific directions, they are ensuring much more discussion, complaint, counter-arguments etc, all leading to more delays.
The fact is that if the OPSS had implemented the recommendations of the Environmental Audit Committee in 2019, we would be well on the way to furniture in our homes free of toxic chemicals and safer from fire than at present. On the other hand, the cost to several industries – e.g. UK furniture, chemical treatment, flame retardants, foam producers and test houses would be in the billions, year on year. So instead, this consultation snubs the EAC by proposing that the UK keeps in place its 3-tier test system and with it those huge profits.
The chief test the EAC recommended dropping was the match/open flame test. The USA dropped its open flame test a few years ago and has had no problems with fire safety ever since. Now, any US citizen can walk into any furniture store and buy flame retardant-free furniture. Here, that is not going to be possible for many years to come, if ever, as I'll explain.
2) The OPSS has an additional reason for ensuring that nothing changes after this consultation: covering its back. The main reason that the OPSS will not agree that the Department itself proved in the 2014 consultation (confirmed in its 2016 consultation) that the furniture regs are not effective and that the open flame test specifically does not work in 80% of cases is because it would face questions about why it has not done anything to put things right for the past 9 years, and the past 4 years since the EAC's inquiry confirmed that the regs are not fit for purpose.
Timing
In the bigger picture, everyone has known since 2014 (and many in industry knew before this) that these regulations do not work in practice.
Many seem to forget that BIS wrote in its Next Steps section of its March 2015 response to the 2014 consultation:
"The aim of this* would be to enable BIS to launch a new consultation early in the next Parliament, covering all the proposed changes to the Regulations which stem from the stakeholder discussions outlined above, complete with draft regulations, guidance and further technical explanations.
"This would in principle enable the full review to be completed by April 2016."
* BIS getting the British Standards Institute to do a bit more work. Unfortunately, for them BSI refused the offer on the grounds that it was regulatory work and "highly political" and therefore not for them. 5 years later it changed its mind and took the commission (and the subsequent funding) from the OPSS, although this time BSI's involvement was to become even more political and regulatory in nature.
At the end of the 2016 consultation document, BEIS said this under "Next Steps":
"This consultation is necessary to enable the UK to make regulations to update the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. Once the consultation is closed, a government response will be published in accordance with government guidelines. The government response document will be placed on GOV.UK along with copies of the responses to the consultation as for the previous consultation. Paper copies of the summary of responses made available on request.
"Following the response, the new regulations will be made and laid in Parliament at the soonest appropriate date."
There was no mention of why they had not kept their earlier promise to have all the new regulations in place by April 2016. But they may have learned their lesson because now they are just saying new regs will be in place as soon as.
It would be three more years before BEIS responded to the consultation comments sent in in 2016, and only then because the EAC demanded that they do so.
In July 2019, BEIS finally responded to its 2016 consultation, with this as the Next Steps:
"We are conscious of the impact of our decision on the timescale for reform but consider it is essential that any regulatory requirements reflect the risks faced today and will keep pace with changing risks and technological advances.
"We are prioritising the development of the new approach. Work to scope the approaches adopted in other countries has been undertaken and we are working with the British Standards Institution to explore the types of standards that might be developed to underpin demonstration of compliance with the essential requirements and we will develop a full impact assessment for implementing the approach."
By the way, the OPSS's claim here that they "are working with" BSI was made before they'd even discussed the matter with BSI! Be that as it may, here we are, four years on from the government claiming that it just has to do a bit of work with BSI before putting out all the changes to the regs. Now, significantly, it's offering no date for implementation.
What is the "new approach" exactly? Well, here is what this document says about it:
"We have reviewed our proposals in the light of stakeholder feedback and the advice of the expert Advisory Panel. The government will now develop a new approach to address the different sources and chemical risks posed by fire to upholstered furniture and furnishings. It will focus on safety outcomes such as reduced risk of ignition; reduced risk of fire spread and will be underpinned by a set of essential safety requirements which all upholstered furniture placed on the market must meet.
"This approach is consistent with that taken for other consumer products. The new legislation will be supported by British Standards which will be developed by the British Standards Institution in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders, including industry, fire-safety experts and consumer representatives."
What is this "expert Advisory Panel"? Well, it's about a dozen people the OPSS simply invited to join, ignoring the pleas of several other government departments, e.g. to go out to tender for members; not just appoint them. Especially when 11 of the proposed 12 all have strong links to the flame retardant industry – a fact they were also made aware of by people in other departments of the government, if they didn't already know. What was the Panel' advice? The document states:
"The Advisory Panel was clear that fire protection must remain the principal objective and priority and that finding ways to achieve this while reducing the use of hazardous flame-retardant chemicals should be the aim. The experts concluded that the responses to the consultation revealed that the evidence base is not sufficient to demonstrate that our proposals would achieve this."
This is truly extraordinary. Apparently, these experts were totally unaware that the 2014 consultation revealed that the regulations provide no fire protection, which the OPSS tries to disguise by then saying the experts could not find evidence that BEIS's proposals would achieve this. Try untangling that statement! Not to worry, though, the experts have a solution. What is it? Well, by total coincidence it's exactly what the OPSS are now proposing: a new approach (even though no one appears to know what that is, exactly).
The details of what the new approach is, as such, make no sense. First, surely the government has already developed an approach to chemical risk and furniture fires? How can these be new? As for developing a reduced risk of ignition; well, yes, but it proved in 2014 that at the moment there is next to no reduced risk from open flame ignition. Why has it waited 5 years to tell us it needs to do something about that?
In short, this conclusion effectively eradicates the findings and proposals of the previous two consultations. Which is indeed what BEIS said it was doing, much to the frustration and anger of the EAC, particularly the Chair, Mary Creagh. Who pointed out that BEIS had been reviewing the regulations for 10 years (in 2019) only to announce that it was scrapping everything and starting again!
The consultation documents can be found here.
First, here is an email I sent to the Sean Valoo and Richard Jude of the OPSS after their "stakeholder engagement" virtual meeting on 18th September. I received out of office responses from Valoo and Jude, saying they were on leave until 2nd October, i.e. they had both vacated themselves after a contentious meeting at a very important time. I subsequently discovered that their boss, Tony Thomas, who was partially at the meeting, quit the Department a few days following it! I sent a reminder to Valoo and Jude but as of 8 October have still received no reply to them. The questions in this email were sent by me to the OPSS in advance of the meeting, since they'd asked for them in advance, giving the clear impression there would be an open debate around them. It may not surprise you to learn that none of my questions were considered in the meeting.
They knew that I'd copied in around 80 stakeholders to my email so I can only assume they do not want to have to admit they can't answer my questions.
I believe this email provides a lot of useful information and areas of conflict about this consultation. If you do not understand anything, please contact me via the Contact page. After the email, I've made some further notes that may be useful.
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Terry <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Date: 24/09/2023 17:17
Subject: Furniture Regs Consultation, stakeholder engagement meeting 18 September 2023
Dear Sean and Richard,
Below are some comments and questions regarding the Teams meeting on Monday 18 September. I have copied this extensively.
Stakeholder engagement
For the first few years of the current review of the FFRs, starting in 2010, stakeholders were frequently and openly engaged in many different forms, from large meetings to personal get-togethers. Agendas were issued before meetings then adjusted according to stakeholder feed-back. Meetings were open to all and during them stakeholders presented points of concern which were then discussed. A meeting note was circulated after each meeting/event, inviting comments from stakeholders. These were incorporated into the final note. The officials leading on the FFRs provided their names and phone numbers to all and were happy to take and respond to phone/email enquiries without censure.
For the record, this is only the second open stakeholder meeting about the FFRs in the past 7 years and the first for three and a half years. This, despite the importance of, confusion over and unresolved issues behind these regulations.
Why has this policy changed at the OPSS? For example, I am having to write to you now because at your "stakeholder engagement" Teams meeting on 18 September there was no opportunity to actually engage with you; no way to ask questions, and the chat function was de-activated. The short Q&A session at the end dealt only with questions pre-selected by you.
As none of my (and colleagues') questions were included in your Q&A session and given you indicated that they would not necessarily be answered at all (you said you'd later deal instead with the "themes" behind the questions), we would very much appreciate answers to the questions below by return, please.
Open flame/match test
A) Why don't your proposals reflect the Environmental Audit Committee's recommendations of 2019, i.e. that the UK government needs to drop the open flame/match and fillings tests and retain just a cigarette test (thereby ridding UK furniture of flame retardants)? What evidence have you discovered to suggest the EAC was wrong in this recommendation? If it exists, why wasn't it shared? Why are you apparently ignoring the following additional supporting evidence for dropping the open flame test:
- In your 2014 consultation documents (confirmed in your 2016 consultation), you presented evidence and logic that the current open flame/match test in the regulations does not work (and never has). This finding was confirmed by the EAC after their own intensive research and testimonies from experts, to add to the considerable research and testing that you did prior to 2014.
- The USA successfully dropped its open flame test some years back. I was at a meeting recently where USA colleagues presented the proof that this action has had very beneficial results on home furniture fires. And you are aware that the EU does not employ its domestic furniture open flame standard, i.e. the UK is pretty much alone in the world in insisting on this test for domestic furniture.
All you cite as "evidence" for keeping an open flame test is that unnamed persons on the National Fire Chiefs Council and in the London Fire Brigade told you they want one. Who are they and where is their evidence to off-set the vast evidence (including your own) that an open flame test is not required?
B) Why aren't you in any case proposing the open flame/match test you put forward in 2014 and again in 2016, given that there has been no evidenced objections to it? What have you learned since that convinces you it would not be effective now?
Timing
- At the 18 September meeting you stated that the new regulations will be implemented in October next year. You admitted, however, that they would not be effective/enforceable until they are accompanied by the new British Standards you have commissioned from the British Standards Institute. People gained the impression that these standards will be ready at about the same time as the regulations. However, you in fact know that the research and development work on these standards is going to take around another 9-10 years. Why did you not inform stakeholders of this on 18 September?
- Have you informed the fire services that firefighters can expect to remain vulnerable to cancers from fire toxicity for many years to come?
- Are you planning to inform everyone, including firefighters, that at the end of this lengthy research/standards-making period the new furniture requirements will still be based on a 3-test system meaning the country will be stuck with flame-retarded furniture, and toxic fires, for a very long time to come?
- Given that we know the current regulations do not work, that they just put huge volumes of flame retardant chemicals into homes, can you please confirm that you will scrap them in this interim period thereby protecting the public and environment against unnecessary pollution? This will comply with the EAC's recommendations while you work on a) trying to prove that more than a cigarette test is necessary and b) developing the standards to enact them.
Fire toxicity
You will be aware of the 2017 paper produced by Professors Richard Hull and Anna Stec (and others) with the self-explanatory title:
"Flame retardants in UK furniture increase smoke toxicity more than they reduce fire growth[1]"
And Professor David Purser's report[2] on fire toxicity to the Grenfell Inquiry which describes how furniture catching fire in the Tower made the blaze more toxic, e.g:
"Materials with a high nitrogen content (including the polyurethane foam [PUR] and acrylic covers of upholstered furniture, and the polyisocyanurate [PIN foam in the Grenfell insulation] produce toxic nitrogen oxides when during well-ventilated combustion and high yields of hydrogen cyanide during under-ventilated combustion."
Both these reports refer to toxic fumes emanating from furniture which complies with the FFRs, leading to deaths and cancers. This is a very serious matter, as I'm sure you're aware. A few years ago, in response to a FOI request asking how much communication the OPSS had had with the Grenfell Inquiry about the regulations, you said "None."
Can you please confirm that you believe you do not have responsibility for what occurs post-ignition with furniture; or instead confirm that you will now be contacting the Grenfell Inquiry to inform them that domestic upholstered furniture is a major cause of fire toxicity and that you are willing to provide them with further information to that end?
If you still believe you do not have responsibility for post-ignition toxicity in furniture, please inform us who does.
I have several other questions (headlined below) and would be happy to meet with you to discuss them. They are based on meetings with experts and material which I do not believe you have access to. I would be very happy to share this information with you. In person.
Other questions – headline points
Enforcement
Trading Standards have not been able to enforce the fire tests within the FFRs since 2014 because, as they informed you that year, the regulations do not work in practice. How will they enforce new regulations that are voluntary?
Child products
Why do your proposals for child products not include child mattresses (above cot mattress size), especially given that the USA has removed all child products from scope of furniture fire safety requirements and the EAC recommended you do the same?
Wear
You know that the subject of wear was discussed at length by a representative group of stakeholders recently (you have seen the meeting note) and the majority view was that given flame retardants have been proven to wear off furniture considerably and soon after entering the home, wear testing should be undertaken to ascertain at what point furniture becomes non-compliant and thereby potentially rendering the regulations redundant. What have you done about this and if nothing, why not? Similarly, why are you keeping second hand furniture in scope knowing that the wear issue alone means that in the majority of cases furniture cannot possibly be fire-safe?
Mattresses
There is wide-scale agreement (even from representatives of the flame retardant industry, e.g. Bob Graham) and evidence (see YouTube videos by UK fire services, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezJ6SorlpJo) that the fire resistance requirements for mattresses in the regulations (and BS 7177) do not have any effect in preventing ignition or fire spread, simply because bedding catches fire first and overwhelms the ignition and crib 5 tests. Why therefore are you still proposing fire tests for mattresses in this consultation?
Similarly, you claimed on 18 September that while the ignition tests protect fillings from fire, a fillings test was still necessary because the covers may wear, be weakened by washing etc. However, as with mattresses, if cover fabric catches fire, the resulting flames will easily overcome the crib 5 requirements for fillings; therefore why does this not demonstrate there is no point in fire requirements for fillings?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29324384/
2https://assets.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/documents/Professor%20David%20Purser%20report%20%28Phase%201%20-%20supplemental%29%20DAPR0000001.pdf
Yours sincerely,
Terry Edge
Some more detailed notes on the consultation
I'm going to start this piece by looking at a fact that is little known but drives much of the conflict around fire safety vs chemical risk. To a degree, it's a note of sympathy for the position that the OPSS finds itself in, albeit it does not seem very concerned to do anything about it.
In short, it's about how the toxicity of home fires has hugely increased over the past 50 or 60 years. Even up to the 60s and 70s, UK homes actually contained few hugely combustible materials. I remember my own house in Essex which typically had stone floors, a few small rugs and sofas that were mostly wooden structures with small thin cushions on them. Any fire therefore would be slow to reach what's known as "flashover" - the point where the fire is so intense that there is a near-simultaneous ignition of just about every surface in the room. Modern homes of course are packed with highly flammable materials in large volumes: sofas, mattresses, cushions; also curtains, thick carpets, large televisions and so on. Although conditions vary - size of room, the degree of ventilation and so on - on average the time to flashover has shrunk by around 10 times for a modern room, to just a few minutes in many cases.
If you want an example of this here is an example, a fire services video showing what happens when a typical bedroom catches fire, i.e. flashover is reached in little over two minutes. Please note that the mattress concerned is UK-compliant, i.e. will be full of flame retardant chemicals. The FR industry used to claim that their products provided 14 mins escape time. In 2019, when testifying to the Environmental Audit Committee, they changed this to 4 mins. They'd never proved 14 mins, and judging by this example would have a hard time justifying 4 minutes too.
Naturally, you would want the time to escape a burning room before flashover occurs. But the fact in a modern house, you don't. Fortunately, most people are not at risk from a fire starting quickly in a sofa (which the open flame test replicates) simply because you will either see it and put it out, or run out of the house. If you are in say the kitchen then the fire alarm will go off giving you time to quit the house. One of the reasons the EAC recommending keeping a cigarette test (as do Europe and the USA) is because of the scenario of dropping one on your sofa, then going to sleep upstairs. The sofa might not catch fire for an hour, then you might be trapped upstairs with toxic fumes rising. As for mattresses, as in my email above, there is no point at all in having fire resistance requirements for mattresses anyway.
The consultation
The Office for Product Safety and Standards has just gone out, for the third time, to consultation on its plans for the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. The previous two, in 2014 and 2016 are however still hanging in limbo, unactioned by the government.
This consultation is a scam because the OPSS has already decided on the outcome, and pretty much admitted it at the 18 September "stakeholder engagement" meeting. For example, they have just commissioned and funded the British Standards Institute to produce new Standards, even before the consultation ends!
Which wouldn't be so bad if the proposals they're making would lead to fire-safe furniture free from flame retardant chemicals. But they won't: they are intended to pretty much maintain the current situation, i.e. sofas and mattresses which do not prevent or resist fire, stuffed with toxic chemicals that do nothing but make home fires more toxic.
Why would they want to do such a thing? I think there are two main reasons.
1) They are getting in line with general government policy which is to put the economy before public health and safety, and the environment. At the Grenfell Inquiry, for example, civil servants from the Dept. for Levelling Up actually stated that if they put fire safety first, the public would starve. Don't believe me? Here's the actual exchange in question:
“What would be wrong with letting somebody… who had life safety as their absolute priority craft the regulation?” Millett (Inquiry solicitor) asked.
"The country would be bankrupt,” Martin (Levelling Up civil servant) said. “We’d all starve to death, ultimately, I suppose, if you took it to its extreme … That’s the policy conundrum governments are faced with … you need to balance the cost of regulation with its benefits.”
“So death by fire or death by starvation and that’s for the government to choose between?” said Millett.
And here's what the OPSS says in its new consultation document:
"This consultation forms part of the Smarter Regulation programme of regulatory reform announcements, that began in May with publication of Smarter Regulation to Grow the Economy. Smarter regulation is about improving regulation across the board, ensuring it is as clear as possible and only used where necessary and proportionate. Through this consultation and further regulatory reform updates, the Government will take action to reduce the burdens on business; reduce the cost of living; deliver choice to consumers; turbocharge science and innovation and drive infrastructure development."
Ring a bell? The OPSS (the office for Product Safety!) wants to "reduce the burdens on business" and wants to use regulations only "where necessary and proportionate". Note there is no mention at all of providing fire safety. Those civil servants at the Grenfell Inquiry were pretty clear that they had in effect chosen to facilitate a fire in which 72 people died a terrible death. So perhaps it's no great surprise the the OPSS is now proposing de-regulatory measures that will poison millions of us and cause thousands of cancers and deaths.
As for the claim that their proposals will "turbocharge science and innovation", a colleague at IKEA once told me that the last innovation in furniture-making was the staple gun. Furniture is not complicated science-wise: it's just padded stuff that you sit or sleep on. But of course this is all part of the smarter regulation spiel. As for the truth behind the drive to de-regulate, to "reduce the burdens on business", the OPSS seems to have forgotten the disaster that was The Red Tape Challenge. This was launched by the government to a lot of publicity in 2011. The aim was to do away with cumbersome safety legislation that got in the way of industry turbocharging its way to saving us all from starvation. We civil servants were told that a website would be set up where members of the public could object to regulations. If any set of regs received 200 or more "No"s from the public then it would be axed. Unfortunately for the government, the safety regs it targeted only got a few comments from the public and most of those were along the lines of "Er, don't we need fire safety laws to protect [for example] children's nightdresses?". Undeterred by public opinion the government then changed the rules and simply ruled that a whole set of safety regs were going to be cut regardless.
One set was the furniture regs. At this time, I and most people believed they worked and were highly successful at saving lives. Ironically, after a year's hard graft, I managed to persuade the Cabinet Office that the changes we were planning to make to the regs amounted to de-regulation, in that industry would save around £50m a year from greatly reduced expensive flame retardants not required for the new open flame test. The regs were saved!
Incidentally, while researching my book, I discovered that the government has removed the official Red Tape Challenge from the internet. I wonder why?
What the OPSS is actually consulting on now is not clear. The title of the main paper is: "Smarter Regulation:
Consultation on the new approach to the fire safety of domestic upholstered furniture". Is it, then a consultation on proposals for the furniture regs or just an approach to new proposals? I believe this is deliberately confusing because of the massive contradiction behind the proposals that the OPSS would rather you didn't dwell on. For example, in the Minister's Foreword he/OPSS officials state:
"The Government is clear that upholstered furniture placed on the market in the UK must be fire safe to protect consumers in their homes. The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988 have reduced deaths by fire and are recognised and recommended internationally as a gold standard for furniture fire safety to this day."
(See my blog for 23 August 2023.)
The truth is that there is no evidence at all that the FFRs save lives (and none is produced in this document). This is partly because it's not possible to say a life was saved from a home fire; it's only possible to show how deaths in home fires have reduced over the years. Because we used to believe the regulations worked, research was commissioned and the researcher (funded by the flame retardant industry) simply guessed what proportion of those reduced deaths were because of the regs. And because the statistical reports were made on the assumption that the regs worked, and we now know they don't, no estimations are valid. Indeed, as the Chair of the EAC pointed out, New Zealand shows near identical reduction in furniture fire deaths as the UK, yet they have no fires safety regulations for furniture and no flame retardants.
As for, "[the FFRs] are recognised and recommended internationally as a gold standard for furniture fire safety to this day", it's no accident that no references are provided. Because the only people who make the same lie are those working for the flame retardant industry.
The consultation includes a set of draft regulations. Which is extraordinary: we go from the vague proposals of the "essential safety requirements" which the OPSS apparently wants the new regs to be based on, to a very specific (but hugely incomplete) set of directions for things like measurements for what constitutes a scatter cushion and what constitutes a floor cushion. The difference is important since currently a floor cushion requires all three tests to be passed, while a scatter cushion only has to have its fillings passed. I worked on this point (and others) with stakeholders for year without a consensus being reached. Now, the OPSS has simply decided on the spur of the moment which is which and without any consultation. Why have they done this? I suspect for two reasons. First, without these draft regulations, the entire exercise would be conspicuously on the thin side: just a few vague essential safety requirements that are undefined. Not much return for what is now 14 years of review. Also, they know full well that in providing specific directions, they are ensuring much more discussion, complaint, counter-arguments etc, all leading to more delays.
The fact is that if the OPSS had implemented the recommendations of the Environmental Audit Committee in 2019, we would be well on the way to furniture in our homes free of toxic chemicals and safer from fire than at present. On the other hand, the cost to several industries – e.g. UK furniture, chemical treatment, flame retardants, foam producers and test houses would be in the billions, year on year. So instead, this consultation snubs the EAC by proposing that the UK keeps in place its 3-tier test system and with it those huge profits.
The chief test the EAC recommended dropping was the match/open flame test. The USA dropped its open flame test a few years ago and has had no problems with fire safety ever since. Now, any US citizen can walk into any furniture store and buy flame retardant-free furniture. Here, that is not going to be possible for many years to come, if ever, as I'll explain.
2) The OPSS has an additional reason for ensuring that nothing changes after this consultation: covering its back. The main reason that the OPSS will not agree that the Department itself proved in the 2014 consultation (confirmed in its 2016 consultation) that the furniture regs are not effective and that the open flame test specifically does not work in 80% of cases is because it would face questions about why it has not done anything to put things right for the past 9 years, and the past 4 years since the EAC's inquiry confirmed that the regs are not fit for purpose.
Timing
In the bigger picture, everyone has known since 2014 (and many in industry knew before this) that these regulations do not work in practice.
Many seem to forget that BIS wrote in its Next Steps section of its March 2015 response to the 2014 consultation:
"The aim of this* would be to enable BIS to launch a new consultation early in the next Parliament, covering all the proposed changes to the Regulations which stem from the stakeholder discussions outlined above, complete with draft regulations, guidance and further technical explanations.
"This would in principle enable the full review to be completed by April 2016."
* BIS getting the British Standards Institute to do a bit more work. Unfortunately, for them BSI refused the offer on the grounds that it was regulatory work and "highly political" and therefore not for them. 5 years later it changed its mind and took the commission (and the subsequent funding) from the OPSS, although this time BSI's involvement was to become even more political and regulatory in nature.
At the end of the 2016 consultation document, BEIS said this under "Next Steps":
"This consultation is necessary to enable the UK to make regulations to update the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. Once the consultation is closed, a government response will be published in accordance with government guidelines. The government response document will be placed on GOV.UK along with copies of the responses to the consultation as for the previous consultation. Paper copies of the summary of responses made available on request.
"Following the response, the new regulations will be made and laid in Parliament at the soonest appropriate date."
There was no mention of why they had not kept their earlier promise to have all the new regulations in place by April 2016. But they may have learned their lesson because now they are just saying new regs will be in place as soon as.
It would be three more years before BEIS responded to the consultation comments sent in in 2016, and only then because the EAC demanded that they do so.
In July 2019, BEIS finally responded to its 2016 consultation, with this as the Next Steps:
"We are conscious of the impact of our decision on the timescale for reform but consider it is essential that any regulatory requirements reflect the risks faced today and will keep pace with changing risks and technological advances.
"We are prioritising the development of the new approach. Work to scope the approaches adopted in other countries has been undertaken and we are working with the British Standards Institution to explore the types of standards that might be developed to underpin demonstration of compliance with the essential requirements and we will develop a full impact assessment for implementing the approach."
By the way, the OPSS's claim here that they "are working with" BSI was made before they'd even discussed the matter with BSI! Be that as it may, here we are, four years on from the government claiming that it just has to do a bit of work with BSI before putting out all the changes to the regs. Now, significantly, it's offering no date for implementation.
What is the "new approach" exactly? Well, here is what this document says about it:
"We have reviewed our proposals in the light of stakeholder feedback and the advice of the expert Advisory Panel. The government will now develop a new approach to address the different sources and chemical risks posed by fire to upholstered furniture and furnishings. It will focus on safety outcomes such as reduced risk of ignition; reduced risk of fire spread and will be underpinned by a set of essential safety requirements which all upholstered furniture placed on the market must meet.
"This approach is consistent with that taken for other consumer products. The new legislation will be supported by British Standards which will be developed by the British Standards Institution in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders, including industry, fire-safety experts and consumer representatives."
What is this "expert Advisory Panel"? Well, it's about a dozen people the OPSS simply invited to join, ignoring the pleas of several other government departments, e.g. to go out to tender for members; not just appoint them. Especially when 11 of the proposed 12 all have strong links to the flame retardant industry – a fact they were also made aware of by people in other departments of the government, if they didn't already know. What was the Panel' advice? The document states:
"The Advisory Panel was clear that fire protection must remain the principal objective and priority and that finding ways to achieve this while reducing the use of hazardous flame-retardant chemicals should be the aim. The experts concluded that the responses to the consultation revealed that the evidence base is not sufficient to demonstrate that our proposals would achieve this."
This is truly extraordinary. Apparently, these experts were totally unaware that the 2014 consultation revealed that the regulations provide no fire protection, which the OPSS tries to disguise by then saying the experts could not find evidence that BEIS's proposals would achieve this. Try untangling that statement! Not to worry, though, the experts have a solution. What is it? Well, by total coincidence it's exactly what the OPSS are now proposing: a new approach (even though no one appears to know what that is, exactly).
The details of what the new approach is, as such, make no sense. First, surely the government has already developed an approach to chemical risk and furniture fires? How can these be new? As for developing a reduced risk of ignition; well, yes, but it proved in 2014 that at the moment there is next to no reduced risk from open flame ignition. Why has it waited 5 years to tell us it needs to do something about that?
In short, this conclusion effectively eradicates the findings and proposals of the previous two consultations. Which is indeed what BEIS said it was doing, much to the frustration and anger of the EAC, particularly the Chair, Mary Creagh. Who pointed out that BEIS had been reviewing the regulations for 10 years (in 2019) only to announce that it was scrapping everything and starting again!