Baroness Crawley
Main Page: Baroness Crawley (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, from time to time a Bill comes along which gets the pulse racing and the heart thumping, and fills us with sheer elation. This may not be quite that Bill. That is not to say that we on this side of the Chamber do not welcome many of its aspects; we will not oppose them in principle, as my noble friend Lady Hayter has confirmed. We, too, thank the Minister for clearly setting out the Bill from the Dispatch Box. However, we believe that there is some way to go before the Bill is strengthened to meet the needs of modern British consumers.
As the gracious Speech of 2013 set out, there is a need for,
“a simple set of consumer rights to promote competitive markets and growth”.
As noble Lords are aware, the main elements of the Bill aim to consolidate legislation in one place. We welcome such consolidation. As the advice from eminent academic studies has shown to both the previous Government and this Government, the UK’s consumer protection has two key weaknesses: uneven enforcement and excessively complex law. If the Bill goes any way to properly addressing those weaknesses and that complexity, it can only be a good thing.
However, many important opportunities were missed to improve the Bill in its passage through the other place, as noble Lords have said. There were opportunities presented by amendments from Her Majesty’s Opposition, such as those to ban double charging or the outmoded and unfair logbook loans regime. There was the opportunity to legally assist consumers who have signed up to unfair contracts that are now sinking them into debt. As president of the Trading Standards Institute, there was also my own particular interest: the opportunity to restore the powers which trading standards officers currently have to investigate counterfeit or potentially dangerous goods. There were also several other amendments. Those were lost opportunities because of being voted down or lack of time in another place. However, I am sure that the Minister will not be surprised to learn that that is not the last he will have heard of such amendments.
We are debating the Bill at a time when people’s living standards are still under great pressure. Even those households still in employment are very often on low wages and unable to keep up with cost-of-living rises. The years of austerity have, yes, made many consumers cannier and more aware of where to get the best deal or find out more about their rights. Yet those years have also seen mounting debt, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has just set out. Those years have been a time when food bank use has increased dramatically and they have seen school breakfast clubs feeding many more children. So it is important that this Bill meets the actual and diverse needs of consumers today. The fact that the consumer landscape currently is more disparate and less statutory than it was four years ago does not help. We continue on this side of the House to raise questions about oversight and accountability in that consumer landscape.
In preparing for this Bill I have spoken to many in the advisory and enforcement community. The trading standards community welcomes the Bill and, like the Government, sees the crucial link between confident, informed consumers and a growing vibrant economy. That is why, like so many of us, it wants to ensure that the Bill is in the best possible shape to assist consumers to help themselves whenever possible, but to have the right powers and tools in place to be able to deal effectively with serious cases when consumers fall into dispute.
A number of key amendments to the Bill would both empower consumers and realise the Government’s intended ambitions. One would be to increase transparency and trust for consumers online. Many noble Lords have spoken about the increase of business online. Buying goods and services from the internet is growing at a phenomenal pace and, with access to information never having been so freely available, this in turn starts to shape how consumers make decisions about who to buy from. The most trusted recommendations for buying come from people we know or from other consumers online. The growth of this third party endorsement and information brings new problems, such as fake reviews, undisclosed competitor blogs and reviews, and a plethora of confusing accreditation schemes.
With information of varying kinds being such an important factor in allowing consumers to make an informed choice, surely the opening up of public data would serve as a valuable tool for consumers. Data from the Citizens Advice consumer service or the complaint data held by local authority trading standards officers about local traders could serve as an invaluable source of information and would give consumers a trusted steer with which to make decisions.
There is nothing to stop public enforcers publishing this kind of data and material, subject to there being an express right to do so. A powerful step forward for consumers would be for this Bill to make provision for such an express power. Such a power already exists for the Office of Fair Trading in the Enterprise Act 2002. Will the Minister look at that possibility in this Bill?
Other key issues that could strengthen the Bill include the removal of disincentives to action when it comes to enhanced consumer measures. Yes, we welcome the provisions in the Bill to give consumers redress, which are potentially quite powerful. However, our concern would be the possible modest take-up of such provision. The new measures are an extension of existing provisions within the Enterprise Act 2002 which allow enforcers to take legal action in the event of unfair trading. Use of these measures has, in the past, been modest at best, through a combination of complexity of process, cost and risk to enforcers. It would be a pity to have well intentioned legislation ignored or underused because of those disincentives. No doubt, again, we will return to this in Committee. Up to now, plans for the implementation of the Bill and education for consumers and businesses about it have been undercooked. I know that there is now an implementation document—my noble friend on the Front Bench has referred to it—but it has only just been received. We will be looking at it to see if there are any firm proposals to invest in a specific campaign to raise awareness of the Bill, as the Bill will bring an instant gap in understanding for many consumers and businesses.
My penultimate point looks at the section of the Bill that deals with powers of entry—or “48 hours”, as the Minister’s shorthand would have it. Several noble Lords have already raised this issue in the debate. We have yet to see any substantial evidence that should lead the Bill to alter the present investigatory regime undertaken by trading standards officers when it comes to visits to traders’ premises. I believe, as does trading standards, that the new provision to serve notice 48 hours before an inspection can be carried out, except where an exception can be made, is a real step backwards in consumer protection. Yes, the Government have made some changes to this area since the first draft of the Bill, but many of us do not believe that those changes have struck the right balance between the right to carry on a business unimpeded by officials and the right to protect consumers and honest businesses, which of course are the vast majority of businesses.
This relaxing of the focus on potentially fraudulent traders goes against the whole trend in another part of consumer protection; I am of course talking of food safety. Quite the opposite is happening there. Since the horsemeat scandal, successive government reviews, the European Commission and consumers alike are proposing more unannounced inspections and sampling as a solution. Indeed, the Government’s own review of food safety powers concluded that the use of unannounced inspections is proportionate to the risks involved and has left the current powers of entry available to trading standards officers untouched for the purposes of food safety enforcement.
I have to ask the Minister: what makes consumer fraud through adulterated food any different from any other kind of consumer fraud? The Government’s proposals on powers of entry create risks and a lack of clarity; bring unnecessary costs, as the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said; add very little value; and could very well act as a disincentive to enforcers to take action. We will without doubt be returning to this point in Committee, which I am sure will be about as welcome to the Minister as Jean-Claude Juncker appearing at the Conservative Party conference.
Lastly, it is not possible to talk about the impact of the Bill on our regulatory system without raising once again the parlous state of trading standards budgets, which, according to the TSI’s recent workforce survey, have fallen by approximately 40% in real terms from 2010-11 to 2015-16. The number of staff employed in trading standards has fallen by 45% in England and Wales between 2009 and 2014, and by 52% in Scotland between 2009 and 2012. These results show that in some areas of the country trading standards services have become unsustainable. It is time for the Government to get a grip and find strategies to at least stem the decline of a UK enforcement service that has been one of the best internationally for over a century.
I am sure that the Minister is a good listener, and I look forward to the many debates that we will have in the coming months to strengthen the Bill as it moves through its stages in this House.