Ongoing research has proven there is a real and serious issue with the availability and use of substandard imported ladders on the UK market.

To tackle this issue, the Ladder Association has been working in partnership with Suffolk Trading Standards Imports Team (Suffolk Imports Team), East of England Trading Standards Authority, the Health and Safety Executive, Office for Product Safety and Standards and Test & Research Centre, to generate intelligence to support a national project to detect unsafe ladders.

This 4-year collaboration has resulted in the successful completion of several market surveillance studies, where samples of potentially unsafe and non-compliant imported telescopic and multipurpose ladders stopped at Port (along with others bought online) were put through a series of safety critical tests at the UKAS-accredited Test & Research Centre. The results only served to confirm our concerns, with the majority failing the tests required to keep users safe.

More recently, the Ladder Association has been delighted to work alongside the Test & Research Centre and Suffolk Imports Team to create a series of checklists and accompanying guidance documents that enforcement officers at seaports can use when examining consignments of ladders coming into the UK.

The initial short-term project focussed on telescopic ladders and saw 100% of the 3,054 products sampled between December 2023 – March 2024, being assessed by officers as ‘unsafe’.

The project has clearly demonstrated the need to continue to monitor and prevent entry of unsafe ladders into the UK, and as a result, market surveillance authorities at seaports will continue to seek and assess consignments of ladders originating from the Far East.

The guidance has also been extended to cover other types of ladders and has been shared across the trading standards community to be used for assessing ladders inland, as well as at the border.

Since 2019, Suffolk Imports Team, in collaboration with the Test & Research Centre, has stopped more than 10,000 dangerous ladders from entering the UK market.

The Ladder Association looks forward to continuing our collaboration with Suffolk Imports Team and other Trading Standards Teams across the UK to help identify and prevent non-compliant and unsafe ladders contaminating our supply chain and making their way into the homes of unsuspecting consumers.