mjr wrote:What criminal offence do you think may be committed by sale of these racks?
Breach of Section 6 of the Health and Safety at Work Act:
It shall be the duty of any person who undertakes the design or manufacture of any article for use at work to carry out or arrange for the carrying out of any necessary research with a view to the discovery and, so far as is reasonably practicable, the elimination or minimisation of any risks to health or safety to which the design or article may give rise.
Although the wording of the Act does not use the phrase 'risk assessment', it neverthless effectively requires any manufacturer or designer of goods for use at work (and the gym in that respect is a workplace, as opposed to being a domestic residence) to undertake a risk assessment of the items they make/design to eliminate/minimise to an acceptable level any reasonably foreseeable risks to health and safety.
This is a fairly general duty, and more recent legislation, especially Regulations enacted under the Health and Safety at Work Act such as the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regs and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regs (PUWER) are more specific in requiring risk assessments. PUWER also ties in with the general regime of product safety legislation (see here for more detail and background).
It's more straightforward if there is a specific BS EN standard which covers a particular product category (e.g. jigsaws) or general classes of product (e.g. woodworking machinery), since they will specify what safety devices that product or class of product must have. So I think that (thanks in no small part to Chris Juden) somewhere in the BS EN standards for bicycles will be the requirement for front mudguards to have a safety release. Putting a product on the market that does not comply with the specific BS EN safety standards for that product is an offence.
I think there is no BS EN standard for cycle racks, and if there is it probably addresses things like bike spacing etc., rather than the safety issue posed by this particular rack. In other words, it's such an inherently stupid design that up till now no one would have thought it necessary to prohibit or restrict it in a BS EN standard (which is how a lot of specific safety legislation happens - something is not mentioned specifically until people are killed or hurt by it, and which point it gets covered by legislation and/or mentioned specifically in the relevant BS EN standard).
In conclusion, where there is no specific requirement for a particular safety feature or design in a BS EN standard, the more general duty to undertake a risk assessment and try to identify and eliminate/mitigate reasonably foreseeable risks will apply, e.g. as above under the Health and Safety at Work Act. This general duty can be harder for Trading Standards to enforce and prosecute compared with a breach involving a specific requirement in a BS EN standard, but it should still be possible, e.g. by pointing out the known danger of front mudguards jamming. Moreover, when people start drawing the attention of the company to the risk, they will not be able to rely on the defence that someone being killed or injured by one of their racks damaging a person's front mudguard was not reasonably foreseeable.
My own personal view is a.) the probability of death/serious injury is so high with a damaged front mudguard, and b.) these racks are so likely to cause such damage, that this is a product which Trading Standards should require to be withdrawn from general* sale.
* I say general sale because there will be some customers for whom it might be suitable, e.g. according to their Twitter page a cycle shop (Temple Cycles) has purchased the racks, and I imagine they are ideal for a bike shop with a lot of mudguardless bikes to display/store.
