Stoke-on-Trent MP’s frustration over button battery safety

An MP has said she is frustrated by the time it is taking to achieve higher safety standards over the use of button batteries despite a toddler’s death.

Stoke-on-Trent Central MP Jo Gideon said simple changes to ensure the batteries were screwed into devices would make a “huge difference”.

She has been working with the family who also want stricter guidelines.

The batteries are used in a huge range of products from watches to toys and kitchen scales, but safety guidance or “good practice” need only be offered on a voluntary basis, Ms Gideon said.

Two-year-old Harper-Lee was admitted to Royal Stoke University Hospital on May 2021 after she started vomiting blood at her Stoke-on-Trent home.

An inquest found acid from the battery burned through her food pipe and into a major artery.

The Conservative MP said she and the little girl’s mother Stacey had since set up the Harper-Lee Foundation to work with government.

Five working groups had been established to look at consumer awareness, data collection and comparisons, emerging technologies, enforcement, and industry standards, Ms Gideon said.

“At the end of November we were told they were updating the standards for toys and there’s going to be extra information about button battery safety required within those standards,” she explained.

But she added: “We need to have a standard that relates across the board to anything that’s got a battery in it and that’s what we continue to push for.”

Ms Gideon said that while she was grateful more groups had come together to campaign for change, it was still hard, two years on from Harper-Lee’s death, to get that change brought in.

“I’m very frustrated,” she said.

“We need to have… either a piece of legislation, or certainly a change to standards that they [switch] from being guidance to being not voluntary any more so we can prosecute, and Trading Standards have more power to their elbow to go after those companies and those retailers that are not complying.”

The British Paediatric Surveillance Unit had completed a survey of hospital admissions which was vital data to show changes were needed, the MP said.