General Product Safety Regulations 1994

The Consumer Protection Act 1987, Part II provided a fairly comprehensive scheme of product safety regulation. In addition to regulation-making powers (including emergency powers), there was a general safety duty and breach of the regulations or general safety duty was a criminal offence. These provisions were supported by giving the Secretary of State the power to issue prohibition notices, prohibiting the supply of unsafe goods, or to serve notices to warn, which require the publication of warnings about unsafe goods. Enforcement authorities could serve enforcement notices preventing the supply of goods believed to be unsafe for up to six months and could seek a court order for the forfeiture of goods which failed to comply with the safety provisions. In addition enforcement authorities were given extensive powers inter alia, to make test purchases, to search, to inspect records and to seize and detain goods suspected of being unsafe. Thus, one might suspect that the General Product Safety Directive1 would pose few problems for the United Kingdom. The Directive introduces a general product safety requirement, requires Member States to have measures in place to ensure that that objective is achieved and introduces an emergency Community procedure as well as developing existing procedures for the notification and exchange of information relating to dangerous products. Indeed the Directive does not provide any serious challenge to the existing structures, but it was thought necessary to replace the general safety duty contained in the Consumer Protection Act 1987 with one which extends the scope of the general duty to all matters covered by the Directive and which uses terminology, such as the crucial definition of safety, which is inspired by the Directive. Thus producers and lawyers in the U.K. will be faced by new and complex Regulations2 which are outlined in this Comment.

In fact the old law cannot be forgotten entirely for the Regulations do not repeal the old law but, rather, disapply in specified circumstances the Consumer Protection Act 1987, s. 10 which imposed the general safety duty to the extent that the