TV presenter Claudia Winkleman’s calls for tougher fire-safety laws on fancy-dress costumes has won the backing of Lancashire fire chiefs and a top plastic surgeon.
Speaking to Chris Hollins on the BBC’s Watchdog last week she described the horror that unfolded when her eight-year-old daughter’s Halloween costume caught fire.
“I was talking to somebody and then I just heard her scream,” she said. “She just screamed: ‘Mummy’ and I turned round and that was that, she was just on fire.
“Everyone was screaming. She was screaming, all the kids there were screaming. It feels like she was on fire for hours, but the surgeon said that it definitely wasn’t the case and it was probably just seconds.
“It was like those horrific birthday candles that you blow out and then they come back… it was really fast, it was fast, it wasn’t fire like I’d seen.
“We couldn’t put her out. Her tights had melted into her skin.”
Classified as toys rather than clothes fancy-dress costumes are subject to less rigorous health and safety standards.
Jorge Leon-Vallapalos, the plastic surgeon at London’s Chelsea and Westminster hospital who treated Matilda Winkleman, says the incident was hardly rare. Calling it “a mini epidemic […] in certain periods of the year” he called for a change in the law.
Tony Crook, group manager at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, agreed: “Children’s fancy dress costumes are not always fire-proofed or fire retardant and they can easily become engulfed in fire if they are exposed to a naked flame.”
Winkleman said the incident was “life changing, but not life defining […] I would like parents to, just on Halloween, just to think about what they’re going to put their kids in because I didn’t, and it cost us.”
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