Oliver Dowden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Oliver Dowden on 2016-02-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, pursuant to the Answer of 25 January 2016 to Question 23018, what steps he is taking to limit the availability of laser pens.

Anna Soubry

I refer to my answer of 25 January.

I have asked my officials as a first step to request an urgent update from Trading Standards on their recent market surveillance activities. I am aware that Leicester Trading Standards recently seized 1,500 unsafe laser pens at point of entry and the importer agreed to destroy them.

In addition RAPEX (the European electronic notification platform for the notifying and removal of dangerous consumer products) statistics show 98 different types of laser pointers were removed from the EU market and of these 9 different products were notified by UK market surveillance authorities.