In a bedroom in Highgate, north London, a delivery courier plugged his ebike into a mains socket to charge it. The lithium battery began to overheat and burst into flames, setting fire to surrounding furniture. The man tried desperately to put out the fire and sustained serious burns before the firefighters arrived. The London fire brigade concluded that the blaze was caused by a charging lead bought online a few days before.
Lithium battery fires are occurring in the UK at a rate of at least six a week, often as a result of faulty batteries and chargers bought online. Self-employed delivery couriers, for example, may look to speed up their delivery times by using cheap parts to convert their pedal cycles into ebikes. They unwittingly buy unsafe goods from third-party sellers on online platforms such as Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and AliExpress. But if just one cell inside a battery overheats, the high temperature can spread uncontrollably to others, causing rapid and devastating fires. These accidents happen due to a loophole in the law. According to Ian Mearns, the Labour MP for Gateshead, mainland Britain “risks becoming almost a wild west, with unsafe products being peddled to unwitting consumers”. The main area of concern is electrical goods.
Rachel Kent, 40, a mother of two from north Wales, bought a replacement laptop charger from a third-party seller on Amazon. She heard a loud crackle and bang from the machine as it was charging on her kitchen table. She ran into the garden and saw fire spread along the table and up the walls. “Luckily, my kids were staying at their grandmother’s that night,” she told the charity Electrical Safety First (ESF). “If they had been in the house, the fire would have been between them and myself, which is absolutely horrible to think about.”
Others have been in much closer contact with faulty items. Cameron Latham, 51, a mental health trainer, sustained severe burns from heated electric socks bought via Amazon. “It took months of pain, antibiotics and podiatry to fix, and is still causing me ongoing problems now,” he says. Roy Dennis, 37, an environmental consultant, “started getting tingling feelings in my arms” when he operated a machine designed to be used with water to polish stone surfaces. “I then saw that the brushes on the motor were exposed to the water”.
Other items fail to do the job they were bought for, with dangerous consequences. Paul Giangrande, 68, a retired doctor, bought several brand-name smoke alarms from a third-party company via Amazon. Soon after installing them, the alarms started beeping. He went straight to the maker and “contacted technical support. It turned out the batch number indicated they were already 10 years old. The expiry date had been pasted over and a new date applied,” he says.
Children’s toys are also an area of concern. In 2022, research by The British Toy and Hobby Association (BTHA) revealed that 90% of toys bought from third-party sellers via online marketplaces were unsafe. Aoife Beirne, 33, from Newcastle, Northern Ireland, bought a wooden stacking tower from the Alibaba website, but “when it arrived it was tiny”. The smallest rings, she says, were the size of grapes. “The perfect size to choke a small child. The images online showed a much larger toy but were obviously Photoshopped.” The BTHA found a 51-piece doctor’s play set with at least 20 parts that could be swallowed easily by children.
Magnets and button batteries are extremely dangerous if they are swallowed, but have been routinely found loose in toys sold online. Charlotte, who preferred to use her first name only, from Bristol, bought a magnetic building blocks game via Amazon. When she opened the package, some tiny magnets fell out and, unseen by her, one rolled under the sofa. It was later picked up by her 18-month-old daughter, who ate it. “She needed an X-ray at A&E and was fine, but they said she could have needed surgery if she had swallowed more than one as they can perforate intestines,” she recalls.
One of the most dangerous items flagged during the BTHA’s safety lab assessments is a toy that might appear to be safe to the naked eye. A plushie toy sold via AliExpress was found to contain 152 times the UK legal limit of phthalate. The chemical is used to make plastic more durable, but it is toxic and can damage the liver, kidneys, lungs and reproductive system when children are exposed to it at high levels.
The advantages of buying from an online marketplace are obvious – access to numerous sellers, cheaper prices and fast delivery – but the disadvantages are not always clear. Unlike buying from a shop or directly from an online retailer, going through a third-party seller means responsibility for checking the safety of the goods is shifted to the consumer.
In fact, third-party platforms have no legal responsibility to check the safety of products sold on their sites – even if they store and deliver the items on behalf of sellers. Instead, the obligation lies with importers and manufacturers. As legislation has failed to keep up with changing shopping habits, customers have become de-facto importers. “There’s basically a loophole in the legislation,” says Kerri Atherton, the head of public affairs at the BTHA.
Third-party sellers and manufacturers are overwhelmingly based overseas – mainly in China and the Middle East. According to Steve Rock, the head of Trading Standards in Kent, some of the manufacturers simply don’t know what the safety regulations are in the countries they export to. But there are also examples of “organised criminal gangs bringing in goods, particularly the stuff that makes the money”, he says. Counterfeit items are particularly at risk of malfunctioning – a fake Nutribullet juicer caught fire when it was tested in an ESF product safety lab.
Marketplaces will usually offer a refund when faulty items are flagged up by customers and say they will take down dangerous items from sale. However, responses to consumer feedback varies. Leonie Coombes, 42, an engineer from York, bought an ultraviolet light to use with her 3D printer via Amazon, which carried a risk of electrocution as there was no earth connection between the metal case and the lead. “I immediately contacted Amazon and asked them to withdraw them from sale and issue a recall. They replied telling me to return it for a refund.” Unhappy with the response, Coombes contacted Trading Standards, whose officers collected the item, inspected it and told Amazon to withdraw it. Contacted by the Guardian, an Amazon spokesperson said: “In this case, we removed the product shortly after the customer contacted us in May 2021 and the customer received a full refund as well.”
Even when items are withdrawn, however, third-party sellers will often re-list them. The BTHA flagged 101 unsafe toys in 2022 but a few months later, 65 seemingly identical items were found on sale, seven listed by the same seller on the same marketplace. These items included teething toys for toddlers that posed a choking risk. “The current whack-a-mole approach from the tech giants is woefully inadequate,” says Sue Davies, the head of consumer protection and food policy at Which?, the consumer organisation. The solution, she says, is to “prevent these items being sold in the first place”.
The lack of regulation means that Trading Standards faces a double burden – tackling not just goods coming across UK borders, but those in small parcels delivered directly to people’s homes through online marketplaces. It has also faced a 50% cut in its budget over the past decade. Between 2017 and 2019, more than 400,000 dangerous products were seized across the world by customs authorities, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As many as 60% of these were in small parcels.
Kent has seven product entry points in the UK – including ports, border crossings and parcel hubs – and only eight Trading Standards staff members checking goods entering the country every day. The Eurotunnel alone processes 100,000 lorries a month. Most vehicles will contain mixed loads known as “groupage” – from pallets of goods to bags of small parcels – and border officials consider themselves lucky if the paperwork matches the goods inside. “If the documents don’t stack up, the lorry potentially needs to be looked at. If it’s groupage, the lorry has got to be unloaded, which takes time. In the meantime, you’ve got other lorries coming in,” says Rock.
Trade bodies and regulatory agencies are in agreement that the legal framework needs to shift the burden from customers to online platforms to check the safety of goods being sold by third-party sellers. “The most pressing thing that the government should be doing in terms of product safety is getting a grip on this and making sure that only safe products can come to market,” says Atherton.
Online platforms do have the technical, as well as commercial, ability to hold suppliers to account. “Amazon is actually quite a responsible online marketplace in that you will find that products that they are selling themselves will be compliant. So they can do this stuff,” says Joshua Drew, a spokesperson from ESF. Since Brexit, the government has an opportunity in the form of its Product Safety Review to amend legislation to better reflect today’s shopping patterns. But, until changes are made, consumers are left to look after themselves, with Trading Standards trying to keep up.
When times are hard financially, shoppers want cheaper prices, but it is worth remembering that if a price seems too good to be true, it probably is. “People think they are getting a bargain when, in fact, they are just getting a counterfeit,” says Mark Gardiner, lead officer for the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. Costs are reduced by cutting corners in manufacturing and skipping safety checks. “It’s worth checking the seller and customer reviews before completing a purchase to see if others have had issues – often highlighted by one-star reviews,” says Davies.
If you are buying risky items such as electrical goods and toys, trading associations recommend checking for a CE mark. This shows that the item has been assessed by the manufacturer as meeting EU safety, health and environmental protection requirements – although it can be faked – and also checking the general quality of the packaging and instructions. ESF advice is to check the voltage of products is 230V, 50Hz: “If your plug looks tiny, do not buy it – it is highly dangerous,” says Giuseppe Capanna, a product safety engineer for ESF. For new toys, Atherton says: “When your child opens a toy, stay with them and check for faults, detachable small parts, access to stuffing and loose or accessible batteries or magnets.”
Giangrande, whose smoke alarms had been doctored with fake labels to disguise a lapsed expiry date, says: “They say ABC. Assume nothing, believe no one and check everything – and that’s what I’m now reduced to. You can’t believe or trust anyone I’m afraid.” Items can be recalled, but life-changing injuries can’t.
