About CO-Gas Safety:

We are an independent registered charity with cross party support at the House of Commons and European Parliament. The charity was founded by Molly Maher and Nigel Griffiths, MP. CO-Gas Safety was launched at the House of Commons of the 25th January 1995 to work to try to reduce accidents from Carbon Monoxide (CO) poisoning and other gas dangers. We lobby for changes, which will help to achieve this. We also help and advise victims whenever we can.

Stephanie Trotter became involved through meeting Molly Maher, who had lost her son, Gary, through CO poisoning in Tenerife. Molly’s daughter, Sheree was confined to a wheelchair, as a result of the same incident. Molly had set up a charity called Consumer Safety International (lobbying for safer holidays). Stephanie had been campaigning for children’s activity holiday centres to be licensed. (her son, Alex was injured at one and had to have an operation for a clot on the brain. Luckily he recovered completely and now has a 2:1 degree from Southampton University (Philosophy) and is now grown up. John Trotter is a senior partner at Bates Wells & Braithwaite, a leading firm of charity lawyers).

Stephanie is a barrister, who has practised and has also lectured at the Inns of Court School of Law for nine years, (postgraduate course - final year of the Bar Exams). She knew nothing about CO poisoning when she started. Hardly any bodies would talk to the charity so she learned from the victims and their families. The same stories recurred again and again.

Quite quickly, Stephanie had compiled a list of aims and objectives that were prepared in February 1995 for our constitution. It is depressing to read these now and find that so few are fulfilled and so many are still extremely urgent. However, there is now a European Standard for CO alarms, (EN50291) and more or less, registration for individual gas operatives. We have also published our own data of CO deaths and incidents and in January 2011 we published 15 years of data. However, the charity has no funding to continue collecting, collating and publishing this data, although it is applying for such funding. Our data collects all unintentional CO deaths and injuries and publishes the names of the dead with the date of death so that anyone can check our data. We have a good relationship with Coroners and try to check deaths with them.

There are still objectives that are unfulfilled, for example prime time TV warnings about CO. A levy on the gas suppliers was put forward by the Health and Safety Commission to pay for raising awareness and for research. The HSC also recommended that the gas emergency service carry and use equipment to test gas appliances for CO. These sensible suggestions were recommended by the HSC in 2000 after an exhaustive gas safety review and with the support of the majority of the stakeholders. Yet neither Government nor industry has implemented these excellent recommendations. Why not?

We are also lobbying for a change that that landlords be licensed, and/or landlords' gas safety checks and certificates require that the appliances is serviced or at least a record of the combustion gas is measured, given to the tenant and kept. Pimlico Plumbers supports us in this and British Gas does not undertake gas safety checks without a full service agreement.

Also in this section:

• Expanded charity information and what we’ve done so far
• Contact information
• Who funds us