Lynn Faulds Wood: Journalist and broadcaster who made her name as a consumer rights champion

She presented the long-running BBC programme ‘Watchdog’ and was also a campaigner on health issues

Faulds Wood, pictured here in 1986, confronted rogue traders on the popular show (Rex)

Lynn Faulds Wood, who has died aged 72, was the campaigning consumer journalist who for more than three decades was a familiar friendly face – and fierce opponent of rogue companies – on TV.

Faulds Wood was born in Glasgow in 1948 and grew up on Loch Lomondside. She studied at Glasgow University, graduating with an MA in languages.

She began her career in journalism on Woman magazine in 1977 and soon moved to national newspapers the Daily Mail and The Sun. While at the red-top tabloid her Lynn’s Action Line column campaigned to close Club Row, a notorious open-air live pet market in east London. She garnered the support of some 100,000 readers, whose letters, petitions and demonstrations resulted in the closure of the market in 1983, following changes to the law.

The BBC’s flagship Watchdog consumer programme was launched in 1985, helmed by Faulds Wood with Nick Ross and, from the following year, her husband John Stapleton. She presented the programme for the next eight years, covering the gamut of consumer issues from bank charges to energy suppliers and the ever-popular “rogue traders” slot, where Faulds Wood and her colleagues would doorstep an unsuspecting rogue and confront them with their misdemeanours.

In 1991 she was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer, finding out at the time that she had a 34 per cent chance of survival. Turning her own personal experience into action and help for others, she presented the World in Action documentaries Doctor Knows Best? (1993) and Bobby Moore and Me (1996), in which she explored the footballer’s misdiagnosis and interviewed his widow. She identified particular discrepancies in what GPs were being taught at medical school about bowel cancer and campaigned for these to be recognised and changed.

After a spell as consumer champion on Good Morning Britain from 2003 to 2009, Faulds Wood returned to the Watchdog franchise with Watchdog Test House for 15 episodes during March 2014. Here, she and Sophie Raworth would carry out intensive testing of consumer products, in several dramatic cases to the point of destruction.

In 2016 she was invited by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to carry out independent research into the state of the country’s consumer recall system. The resulting report, UK Consumer Product Recall, showed how some companies’ attitude to safety had been simply that “safety doesn’t sell”. She said: “Unsafe products still blight too many lives with thousands of unnecessary injuries, accidents, fires and even deaths every year.”

Faulds Wood’s report called for the creation of a “national product safety agency” which would act as the regulator for the industry, with a centralised register of product safety issues and recalls. This recommendation is yet to be implemented.

That same year she turned down an MBE. Speaking at the time, Faulds Wood said: “I would love to have an honour if it didn’t have the word ‘empire’ on the end of it. We don’t have an empire, in my opinion … I think honours are really important and should be given to people who have done really good stuff.

“I’ve changed laws and I’ve helped saved a lot of people’s lives, so maybe I’m deserving of an honour, but I just wouldn’t accept it while we still have party donors donating huge amounts of money and getting an honour.”

Faulds Wood had just taken part in the applause for the NHS outside her home when she suffered a stroke and died the following day.

She is survived by her husband, the journalist John Stapleton, whom she married in 1977, and their son Nick.

Lynn Faulds Wood, journalist and broadcaster, born 25 March 1948, died 24 April 2020