Consultation Hub

We invited views on how to improve the UK’s product safety framework. The government is committed to ensuring that only safe products can be placed on the market now and in the future. Effective product safety regulation is essential for public protection, ensuring fair competition, consumer confidence and supporting innovative and safe products to reach the market. Government also has the opportunity to regulate product safety in a way that supports our Net Zero ambitions. 

We received 158 responses from interested parties. A summary of the responses is included in the government response document.

Based on what we heard from respondents, while the current framework has strengths, it is facing significant and growing challenges and needs ambitious significant reform to be more adaptable and capable of responding to accelerating change. Government recognises the need for a long-term approach and for there to be regulatory change, to fully address the challenges raised by respondents.

In the coming months we intend to consult on an ambitious and multi-faceted reform programme, with priorities including helping businesses to understand their legal obligations by ensuring our future framework is as simple, consistent, and risk proportionate as possible. We will also consider how product safety processes and testing requirements could become more risk based, addressing the impact of the changes brought by e-Commerce to the product safety framework, including gaps in enforcement powers that have emerged with the rise of new technology and business models.

Ensuring that the future framework takes full advantage of the UK having left the EU, is adaptable and responsive to the challenges of the future will require legislative change. We value the expertise and insights that stakeholders have offered as part of this exercise to inform our review, and we will continue to work with them as we develop our evidence base, with a view to putting forward proposals for consultation in due course.

In addition to looking at longer term reform, the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) is taking immediate actions, in particular to address safety risks from products being sold online. This includes issuing a warning to UK consumers, highlighting the product safety risks when shopping online and leading a programme of work focusing on the safety and compliance of goods sold by third-party sellers on online marketplaces.

We invited views on removing the requirement for offshore oil and gas operators to make relevant documents available for public inspection at a specified address, where the effects of coronavirus related restrictions on movement meant that it is was not reasonably practicable for the public to access documents in this way. We proposed that the offshore oil and gas operators instead made the documents available on a publicly accessible website.

We received 3 responses from interested parties. You queried that while websites which will host the documents may not be in the purview of the regulations, but will be delivering what amounts to a public service, if these websites would meet web accessibility standards required of public service websites.

In addition to the offshore oil and gas operators making the documents available on their websites BEIS would consider making the documents available on our website which does meet web accessibility standards required of public service websites.

We sought views on the draft Co-ordination of Regulatory Enforcement Regulations 2017 which include measures to ensure that Primary Authority can operate from 1 October 2017 when the scheme is extended and simplified by provisions in the Enterprise Act 2016.  We also asked for views on replacing the ‘categories’ system for defining the scope of partnerships.

We received 64 formal responses and also obtained feedback from around 240 stakeholders who attended engagement events held during the consultation period.  

Stakeholders were broadly supportive of the measures in the draft regulations. There was a wider range of views on the proposed new approach for determining the scope of partnerships.

As a result of the consultation responses and wider stakeholder feedback we have amended the draft regulations. 

We have also produced draft revised Primary Authority Statutory Guidance. This reflects and clarifies the changes to Primary Authority introduced by the Enterprise Act 2016 and the new secondary legislation. It also describes how the new approach to defining partnerships will work in practice. 

The full Government response is published at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/unlocking-the-potential-of-primary-authority