Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, how much has been spent from the public purse on (a) central and (b) local government funding for product safety in the last twelve months for which data is available.

The Department provided funding of £1.9 million in the financial year 2016-2017 to support product safety. This includes targeted enforcement at ports and borders through National Trading Standards teams, improving standards and testing goods to remove unsafe products from the market and work with consumer bodies and charities to raise awareness of product safety through national campaigns.

No data is held by the Department for product safety funding at a local level. Local authorities are independent from central government. As such, resourcing decisions on funding for product safety are for individual local authorities to make, and local government is accountable to local communities for those decisions.

The Government is currently considering the recommendation of the Working Group on Product Recalls and Safety for greater national capacity to support consumers on product safety.