I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require retailers to register white goods at the point of sale to facilitate product recall; and for connected purposes.
My Bill has a simple aim: to make the registration of white goods compulsory at the point of sale. Registration is essential because without a data bank of contact details manufacturers are unable to get in touch with buyers when things go wrong and a recall is necessary for repair or replacement, and, as we all know, things do go wrong.
According to the estimates by the charity Electrical Safety First, which firmly supports my Bill, faulty electrical products are responsible for over 7,000 domestic fires a year. In England alone over the last five years, 33 house fires a day were caused by white goods. The dangers of non-registration are real, and they were made stark in the recent Whirlpool recall scandal, where a potentially dangerous fault was discovered in certain Hotpoint and Indesit washing machines. As so few of the appliances were registered, the manufacturer, Whirlpool, was only able to make contact with 40% of customers for a recall, and then only after many months of a big, expensive campaign. The recall response rates are normally about 10% to 20%. Thankfully, nobody died or was maimed, but about 80 fires were directly attributable to that electric fault alone, many of which would have been preventable had the manufacturer been able to get in touch with the consumer easily.
The fact is that very few customers register their appliances under the current voluntary system, and that includes many of us in this place. I did a simple straw poll among colleagues last week, and found that not one single person could say, hand on heart, that they had registered every appliance that they had ever bought with the manufacturer. Hon. Members know the scenario; we take the registration card home with every intention of filling it out and sending it off, but we never do. Compulsory registration would deal with lethargy at a stroke. It would also deal with the fact that some people are put off from registering their goods because they worry about their privacy. People have bitter experiences of handing over contact details and then being bombarded with telephone sales pitches or requests to take part in umpteen bogus household surveys. My Bill deals with that by making it a requirement that the details contained in the registration documents can be used only for recall purposes, meaning no marketing and no customer loyalty information, and nothing would be given to the manufacturer unless there was a recall.
We do give our details to retailers already, however, because we usually need to arrange the delivery of bulky goods. In the case of online purchases, we always give our details to a manufacturer, so all that really needs to happen is for information to be collected systematically and provided to a manufacturer if there is a recall. We need a body to hold the information centrally, of course, and to provide oversight, and I am open to discussions about who that could be. Currently, electrical goods recalls are the responsibility of a local authority, and they are not dealt with by a centralised body, because no such body—something like the Food Standards Agency—exists in the UK. However, it could be a role for the new Office for Product Safety and Standards, which is set up to deliver consumer protection. But that can be discussed.