The Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) has an operating budget of £25m a year, and more than 200 staff.

Trading standards officers still police product safety out in the community but the OPSS sets the strategy.

In the summer of 2018 it published a two-year plan.

“We have a good [safety] system,” says OPSS chief executive Graham Russell. “Consumers can be confident about the safety of the products they buy.”

He does admit that the events of recent years will have “caused consumers to have concerns”. Those can be easily summed up as three questions:

Immediately after its launch, the OPSS began reviewing compliance systems at white goods manufacturers.

There is a general requirement for manufacturers, importers and distributors to ensure products are safe. But the safety standards across the board are still in effect voluntary, although some are referenced in EU law.

So, the British Standards Institution at UK level (and others at EU and global levels) are private bodies which bring manufacturers and experts together to agree what should be considered safe to sell.

Some products will develop faults over time, but a priority for the OPSS is to work out how many products are causing damage and injury and how many people are affected. Data is patchy, and so far nobody has been pulling it together and analysing it.

Campaigner Lynn Faulds Wood raised the issue in a report, saying she was surprised at how little data and information was shared. An injury database is regarded as “vital” in the US but there is nothing to compare in the UK or Europe.

Consider a small fire caused by a faulty appliance in the home.

Firefighters might put it out and not inform anyone. An insurance company might replace it and not inform anyone. A resident might throw out the dangerous appliance and have burns treated at the local walk-in clinic which does not tell anyone what caused the injury.

All three - the firefighters, the insurance company, and the NHS - have data about the incident, but it might never be pulled together. Nobody knows about the fault and the damage and injury it has caused. There is less chance of anyone stopping it happening again.

“A strategy focused on analysis and intelligence is where we can make the biggest impact,” Mr Russell says.

That intelligence must surely be helped if firefighters, for example, knew exactly which appliances had been at the centre of a fire.

The LFB's Mr Pugsley says that even after his 14 years of investigative work, it still could be impossible for him to identify a gutted appliance. Unlike the vehicle identification number in cars, there is no requirement for fireproof labelling on white goods.

Which? research suggested that of 3,203 fires in the UK thought to have been caused by faulty appliances in the year from April 2016, investigators could only find the product make and model information in 33% of cases. That is fewer than the previous three years.

The OPSS says it is researching indelible marking used in the US and elsewhere, but has yet to draw any conclusions.

Only a third of households register their appliances, according to rather limited research quoted by the OPSS.

The Register My Appliance system, introduced by AMDEA in 2015, is voluntary and covers about 90% of large white goods in the UK.

Filling in the registration form would give owners an automatic alert, usually by letter, if there is a safety issue - but many people have (unfounded) concerns they will be blitzed with spam if they register.

Whirlpool says: “Of all the lessons we have learned through our dryer campaign, the importance of product registration has been the most crucial. It is vital that consumers always register ownership of their appliances as soon as they acquire them.”

The system becomes even more difficult when items are bought second-hand. AMDEA says buyers should check the retailer, the reviews and the recalls.

There is an official recall website, but it is not searchable and not particularly user-friendly.

That means consumers are usually told about recalled faulty products via adverts, signs in shops, and the media. Typically, only 10% of recalled items are actually recalled or returned.

“Our ambition, clearly, is to get this to 100%,” says Mr Russell, from the OPSS. “It is not technology that is the barrier, it is mainly the culture.”

The evidence, he says, is from the case of Samsung's burning batteries. The Galaxy Note 7 phone was recalled after cases of overheating.

The saga is thought to have cost $5.3bn (£4.3bn) and was hugely damaging for the South Korean firm's reputation. However, from a product safety viewpoint, the recall was almost entirely successful. The company knew who owned the phones, and they were able to send updates that limited or prevented charging by anyone who kept hold of them.

That is a modern solution that may make some consumers feel uncomfortable. New technology will change the products in our homes beyond recognition - but will they be safe?

A future of 5G-connected home appliances may make things safer.

Electronic labelling might solve the problem of identification after a fire, but it still needs to work when the device has a flat battery or no screen. Artificial intelligence may prove to be more adept at spotting unsafe products than the much-criticised risk assessment system.

Internet-connected appliances may be switched on automatically, when they are needed, at any time of day. However, they can also be switched off automatically at any sign of danger.

All these questions are being asked and researched by the OPSS.

In the meantime, appliances are leading to 60 house fires a week in the UK, according to Which?.

These are fires which are destroying the wedding photographs and belongings of people like the Garnhams, are taking the young lives of people like Bernard Hender, and are the likely source of the devastation which ripped through the community in Grenfell Tower.

We must all hope the authorities come up with the answers, and soon.