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Melanie Johnson MPRoSPA National Congress on Home Safety Partnerships |
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I am delighted to join you once again at the RoSPA National Congress. It's great to see so many health professionals, practitioners in home safety, trading standards officers and others here, today. Home Safety Partnerships - the congress theme - are key to making the most of everyone's efforts to tackle safety issues. In DTI we want to work in partnership to deliver consumer safety. Our role is to raise productivity, creating prosperity for all. To do this, we need a market framework that produces competitive, innovative and productive businesses. Competition is key to this framework. Competition gives consumers more choice, better value, higher quality and lower prices. But we also need a strong consumer base. Competition on its own is not always enough to protect consumers or to safeguard the interests of legitimate businesses. It won't ensure that products on the market are safe. So putting in place necessary standards is sometimes needed. Consumers in this country have long been too weak. We need to, and we are, empowering them. An important part of this is making sure consumers are safe, and can have confidence in products. Promoting consumer safety is tremendously important. Not just because it helps create a strong market framework. Because it's right. Particularly when you think that there are well over 3 million injuries involving products in the home every year. Consumers' accidents are a cause consumer detriment. Because of this we need to recognise the importance of safety in the competitive framework. In DTI we have now mainstreamed safety topics so that they are considered alongside, for example, consumer publicity and information themes and with consumer research and data collection. But we in Government cannot act alone. We need to work in partnership, with industry to raise safety standards, with enforcers to tackle abuse, within Europe to ensure that our levels of consumer safety are maintained and with advice agencies to help empower consumers. Events such as todays are a valuable means of raising awareness and exchanging ideas between experts, practitioners and policy-makers. RoSPA have done a tremendous job organising this event and in bringing everyone together. I've said that in Government we recognise the need to work in partnership. In DTI, we are promoting consumer safety in a number of different ways. There are three areas that I want to highlight: First through supporting local action by funding projects. Secondly by providing information and publicity to raise awareness and thirdly through working at the heart of Europe to develop the right regulatory framework. Modernisation Fund - individual projects The first of these, funding local projects through the Consumer Safety Modernisation Fund has been a real success in building partnerships in the community. These projects are making a positive difference at local level. £2.5m has been awarded during the past two years, supporting 44 consumer safety projects around the UK. The second round of 32 new projects is getting underway during this financial year, building on the success of the first twelve. Feedback from the first wave of projects, which are now coming to an end, has been very positive. This year we were overwhelmed by the response. Almost four hundred applications were made for the £1.1m available. RoSPA have had their work cut out to handle the applications on our behalf, run the selection process, monitor the projects and provide day-to-day contact. They have done an excellent job and I am most grateful to them. Projects this year take a very broad approach to accident prevention. In Northern Ireland a project looks at ways of reducing accidents among children in the traveller community. A scheme in Blackburn will deliver training in safe DIY practice. Several projects aim to raise public awareness of home accidents. For example, Bournemouth's Streetwise Safety Centre is to produce an interactive CD Rom to encourage children to spot hazards. A more traditional approach is taken by Herefordshire Accident Prevention Group whose proposal involves construction of tabletop models to demonstrate accident scenarios in the home and garden. In North Lincolnshire innovative drama presentations will be used to deliver important home safety messages. These projects will make a real difference to communities up and down the country. The Modernisation Fund money has also benefited the two national accident prevention charities directly. We have agreed a diverse work programme with RoSPA, including the development of safety education for school children, collection of good practice in home safety and extending the coverage of the home safety liaison officer network. The Child Accident Prevention Trust has used the Modernisation Fund to develop practical solutions to the serious problems of Burns and Scalds, particularly to the under fives. CAPT have produced an innovative video aimed at practitioners offering key safety advice to parents and carers about preventing hot drink accidents in babies and young children. So far this has been very well receive and we look forward to seeing this resource rolled out to health and early years practitioners. CAPT have also organised a series of round-table meetings involving the industry, government, the health sector and others to consider what can be done about the number of accidents involving bathwater scalds. This has provided a real opportunity to influence housing policy through review and consultation processes. CAPT recently submitted evidence to the Housing Corporation and Office of the Deputy Prime Minister suggesting a bath water outlet temperature of 46 degrees C with a recommendation that this be achieved through the use of thermostatic mixing valves. These issues are being pursued and stand a good chance of achieving lower bath water outlet temperature requirements in some circumstances. Our work with CAPT, now forms the focus of effort to make a real difference in the area of burns and scalds. It builds on the consumer information campaign we ran earlier in the year. 2003/4 Modernisation Fund scheme I am very pleased to announce today that we will run the Consumer Safety Modernisation Fund scheme again for the third and final year. We expect overall to make available between £1m and £1.5m, to support RoSPA, CAPT and to fund more projects. But the final figure will be dependent on the current business planning within the DTI. So watch this space. The criteria for next year's scheme will be placed on the Home Safety Network website later this week. Closing date for applications is 17th January 2003 with a targeted start date of April 2003. The second way in which Government can work in partnership is to work through those who have direct contact with consumers. To provide information necessary to promote consumer confidence and drive forward competitive markets. A key part of our work involves dissemination of information and advice for use by third parties in assisting consumers. Home Safety Network website Our Home Safety Network Website, as the main store of safety information, continues to be very popular. The site contains all our most recent research reports in full covering topics as diverse as safe packaging through to electric blanket safety and safety of older people on stairs. It also includes a range of publicity and practitioner resources including the full contents of our 2002 Fireworks toolkit and Schools packs. The outcomes of all the Modernisation Fund grant projects will be placed on the web to facilitate dissemination of good practice. Safety Campaigns We have also worked in partnership to ensure the continuation of the "Slips trips and broken hips" campaign. I am very pleased that Help the Aged have agreed to take over this work. We believe that our three-year campaign, which concluded in March of this year, on Falls prevention has made a real difference to accident prevention. Together with the rollout of the NHS National Service Framework for Older People, the profile of falls prevention has been raised considerably. We have done what we can in providing high quality materials for use by practitioners. You will hear more from Help the Aged at tomorrow's conference. Our strategy on consumer safety campaign work is now to refocus activity to where we know we can make a real difference and to work though others on major topics - as we have done on Falls - to deliver effective information and promote awareness. Fireworks campaign I couldn't come here today and talk about consumer safety partnerships without mentioning the serious problems that have been experienced up and down the country though misuse of fireworks. I know only too well how inconsiderate use of fireworks causes problems of noise and nuisance and the distress that results. We have been actively considering across government, with industry and enforcement authorities what action can be taken to address these growing problems. The number of injuries involving fireworks last year was 1,362, representing a 40% increase on the previous year, despite the excellent efforts by many of you here today. It was clear from all this that much more needed to be done. That is why on 15 October I announced a major package of measures to tackle the problems cause by fireworks. These include:
But there is also a responsibility on consumers to use products properly and with consideration to others. We have redoubled our efforts on fireworks publicity, working with the support of organisations such as CAPT, Fight for Sight and ROSPA. This year's main campaign focus was on young teenagers, particularly boys. Injuries to this age group are disproportionately high and are more likely to result from incidents in the street or public places. Accidents in the street were up nearly 60% in 2001. This is against the background where it is illegal to sell fireworks to anyone under 18 and illegal to set them off in the street. We produced 25,000 updated firework safety education packs circulated to schools across the country at the start of the autumn term. We distributed 2,000 updated copies of a tool kit to Local Authorities, Fire Brigades and others with detailed information on all aspects of firework safety and enforcement. We have seen some excellent examples of how agencies have come together to deliver messages to schools and consumers locally. The campaign was supported by a massive printing and distribution of posters and leaflets and two new TV adverts sent to all the main TV stations for free showing. We also issued, a six-sheet poster advertisement for display at sites such as bus shelters and public places. The media campaign focussed on 'the hot spots' - areas where there were particularly high numbers of firework-related injuries last year - and included local victim case studies and placement of copy in the press. Of course, it's too early to tell whether, overall, our efforts have been successful, but we are hopeful that our efforts together with those of our partners, local authorities, fire brigades, the police and others, will have made an important contribution to this problem. Europe Those are some of the things we are doing to offer practical help and to promote consumer safety though information campaigns in the UK. Lastly I want to talk about our work on developing the right regulatory framework in Europe. Earlier this year I launched a strategy paper aimed at "making Europe safer for consumers". This argues for a more focused approach to safety across all the Member States, using joined-up research and data collection to identify the real problems and tackle them effectively. Europe also plays an important role in the UK's legal framework for consumer safety. The revised General Product Safety Directive was published in January this year, and we are now working to introduce it in the UK by 2004. It will strengthen the general product safety regime, by clarifying the scope of the law, giving standards a more important role, and giving consumers greater protection against products that are found to be unsafe after they have been put on the market. In recent months we have also been talking to our European partners about how to ensure that the services provided to consumers are safe. This is an area where there seems to be a lack of good information about safety problems, and I hope that the work currently under way will help to give us all a better understanding of the key issues. I've explained how DTI is actively engaged in safety partnerships with our key stakeholders in and that this close working has made a significant contribution towards promoting consumer safety. In conclusion, therefore, I would like to thank RoSPA for inviting me here today and for your support and efforts throughout the last year with our safety work. I wish your Conference well. |
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Other speeches by Melanie Johnson MP
(the following are available from the archive) |
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