Simple tips to avoid falling foul of safety regs

Recent prosecutions for supplying unsafe products have highlighted the responsibility of manufacturers to take reasonable steps to ensure the compliance of their products.

The Trading Standards office in Walsall, West Midlands, UK, has recently successfully undertaken prosecutions against six companies for supplying products that were unsafe.

The total fines in these cases were GBP 27,593, plus the companies' own legal costs and the loss of sales due to the prosecutions.

The companies could also be facing prosecution throughout the UK by other Trading Standards offices for similar reasons.

So how can individuals and companies best protect themselves from the liability associated with unsafe products? Protection from liability issues starts in the design stage of a product.

Designing with geographic markets and end use application in mind is key to ensuring a final product that does not require cost prohibitive and time-consuming retrofits.

The second stage of this is more of a cost-cutting and timesaving measure.

Buy pre-approved critical components.

This saves having to retest these components individually, which keeps the cost and time to market at acceptable levels.

The next level of protection is to ensure the product is compliant with all of the regulatory requirements that apply.

Ask a third-party laboratory to verify what they feel are the applicable requirements for the product, even if you will be testing the product at your own test facility.

This is a good way to double check what the actual requirements are.

The biggest part of this is doing your homework.

Now comes the real meat of the protection - test data.

In markets that allow self-declaration, manufacturers can do this with no test data.

This route provides the least protection, and in a court of law the supplier would have no basis for defence.

Manufacturers can perform testing in their own labs and then self-declare compliance.

This offers better protection in the courts, but may not satisfy the requirements of all countries and distributors/customers' questions over the integrity of the test data.

Another route is to have an independent third party laboratory do the testing, and then do a self- declaration.

This allows for much better protection in the eyes of the courts and potential distributors or customers.

The highest level of protection from a regulatory perspective is to have a product certified by an independent laboratory.

Certification (sometimes referred to as "listing") of a product generally means that the product is tested to meet applicable standards and that the manufacturing of this product is monitored by the certifying body.

A certification mark is used to identify products that meet the requirements of the certification body.

Examples of international recognised certification marks are the TUV Rheinland GS Mark, Q Mark and cTUVus Mark.

Crucially, the total cost of testing and certifying all the products covered by the Walsall prosecutions would have been less than the cost of the prosecution brought against the companies.

A full range of product testing and certification services are available from TUV International UK.

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