Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) consultation on The UK’s new core product regulation market surveillance and enforcement framework - Which? response

Which? welcomes this opportunity to respond to the OPSS’ consultation on The UK’s new core product regulation market surveillance and enforcement framework

Summary

We strongly support the government’s proposal to modernise the UK’s fragmented product enforcement landscape into a single, cohesive toolkit. For too long, systemic regulatory failures and glaring loopholes, particularly within complex online supply chains, have exposed shoppers to staggering quantities of non-compliant and dangerous goods. While a unified set of powers applicable from the border to the digital storefront is a common-sense reform, a framework is only as strong as its ability to deter bad actors. To genuinely protect consumers and rebuild trust, this modernised regime must be backed by heavy penalties, strict accountability, and an empowered, independent regulator. 

• Closing the Online Marketplace loophole and ensuring accountability 

The vast regulatory gap between traditional high street retailers and online marketplaces must be closed. Which? is calling for explicit statutory duties of care for online platforms, requiring them to rigorously verify seller compliance before products are ever listed. Furthermore, any business selling into the UK must be legally mandated to appoint a UK-based representative to serve as a physical, legally actionable point of contact for safety authorities. Crucially, we strongly welcome the introduction of bespoke online interface orders. These are a vital mechanism that will provide enforcers with the explicit power to definitively block non-compliant businesses and online marketplaces from selling unsafe goods to UK consumers. 

• Sanctions that serve as a genuine deterrent 

For penalties to successfully alter corporate behaviour, the government must move away from rigid, pre-set fines that multinational e-commerce giants can simply treat as a cost of doing business. Which? advocates for variable monetary penalties and daily escalating sanctions calculated as a percentage of a company's global turnover. While low-friction civil penalties are appropriate for minor administrative breaches, criminal penalties and director disqualification must be retained for high-harm, systemic, or fraudulent non-compliance, such as platforms repeatedly ignoring mandatory product takedown orders.

• Resourcing frontline enforcement via 'Polluter Pays'

The UK's enforcement ecosystem is under pressure and inadequately resourced with a lot of responsibility still falling to local authority Trading Standards services (TSS), Which? strongly supports a robust cost recovery framework that forces non-compliant businesses, including sellers or the online marketplaces that facilitated the sale of unsafe products to fully reimburse authorities for the substantial costs of complex investigations, laboratory testing, and safe hazardous waste disposal. 

• Shifting the focus to direct consumer redress

Historically, product safety enforcement has penalised rogue businesses without offering direct resolution to the affected public. The modernised regime must introduce fairer redress mechanisms, including collective actions and mandatory communication orders that compel platforms to use their proprietary customer data to contact affected buyers directly with high-visibility safety warnings. Additionally, while Which? supports enforcement undertakings where a business formally agrees to corrective action in lieu of prosecution, these must directly benefit harmed consumers through mandated compensation or replacement programmes, and they must be strictly barred for repeat offenders or severe safety breaches. 

• Establishing an independent statutory regulator

To turn the tide on systemic safety failures and drive wider economic growth by boosting consumer confidence, the enforcement infrastructure itself must evolve. Advanced powers like online interface orders will only reach their full potential if wielded by an empowered and autonomous body. Therefore, the government should establish the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) as a fully independent, consumer-focused statutory regulator. Free from competing departmental priorities, this independent body must be supported by legal frameworks that mandate real-time, seamless intelligence-sharing networks between national regulators, frontline Trading Standards services, Border Force, and emergency services to intercept high-risk products before they cause domestic harm. 

As part of the review that DBT is undertaking into Trading Standards duties, it also needs to ensure that enforcement responsibilities, for both product safety and metrology, reflect the complexity of the business and the scale of the harm. This will require a redistribution of responsibilities for larger and more complex businesses to the OPSS in a similar way to the approach that the Food Standards Agency is adopting for larger, national businesses as part of its work on National Level Regulation. It also needs to be ensured that there is appropriate expertise within the system at the most appropriate level, including reviewing the role of national and regional teams rather than the current approach which relies on local authority prioritisation to ensure sufficient expertise, skills and resources exist within the system.