According to a BBC interview with Trading Standards the UK is being flooded with cheap replacement chargers for mobile phones and other handheld devices (including portable games consoles). In the interview Chris Holden, a Senior Trading Standards Officer, said there are “hundreds of thousands” of cheap and potentially dangerous chargers in the market, including some counterfeit products which are falsely bearing the recognised CE mark.
The influx has been fuelled by the fact these chargers tend to retail at under £10 in unofficial shops and online, which can be up to half the price of an official replacement unit.

One of the criticisms of modern chargers is the lack of standardisation. While some manufacturers have taken the route of miniUSB as a connector (allowing a user to charge from both a wall socket and their PC), there are plenty of handsets vendors still making proprietary connectors, thus adding to the mass of cables in our homes and offices and ensuring that if a charger does break – the chances are you can’t use a charger from something else you already own.