Member

It is really important to highlight and stress that people assume that if something is on sale in the UK it must be safe—even more so, as the noble Baroness said, if it is the recommended school uniform. But noble Lords may be aware of the case involving the retailer Hobbycraft, which at the weekend stopped selling a play sand. A member of the public saw reports from Australia and New Zealand that sand that looked similar contained asbestos, then got the sand tested and found that it contained significant levels of asbestos. That member of the public went to Hobbycraft, and Hobbycraft said, “Oh, well, there’s not a government direction. We’ll stop selling it, but we’re not going to issue a recall because there’s no government direction on this”. This case has exposed that after changes that happened after Brexit, under health and safety law the Government cannot apply the precautionary principle and could not at that point have issued a recall, because they would have had to do the tests themselves before they could do the recall.