Standard - Household Cots

The Product Safety Standards (Household Cots) Regulations 2000 and The Product Safety Standards (Household Cots) Regulations 2005

Cots are a sleeping environment for children where they can be expected to be left unattended for long periods of time. They must therefore be safe. Older cots with knobbed corner posts and decorative cut-outs have been implicated in child fatalities.

The regulations were put in place to help reduce an unacceptably high incidence of injury associated with cot use in New Zealand. A number of these injuries could be directly attributed to hazardous design features.

It was considered necessary to introduce regulatory measures both to ensure that only new designs that were safe could enter the market and also to protect consumers from older unsafe designs in the substantial second hand market for this product.

The regulations declare AS/NZS 2172 Cots for household use- Safety requirements (with variations) to be a product safety standard.

Note

The new Product Safety Standard for household cots came into force on 18 August 2005. However, the 2000 regulation will remain in effect until 22 July 2006 to allow for a transition period for manufacturers, importers, suppliers and retailers to comply with the new standard.