Consumer Rights Bill
Debate between Baroness Crawley and Baroness Wilcox
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, I simply wish to add my support to my noble friend’s amendment. We know that there are more than 4 million small businesses in the UK today. I am sure that we would all agree that they are the lifeblood of the economy. They account for well over 90% of all enterprises and employ up to 14 million people. We know that we live in very difficult economic times; that is the case for millions of our fellow country men and women. We also know that the vast majority of people who move from unemployment into employment go through the private sector and the small business sector.
This amendment put forward by my noble friend gives us an opportunity to assist those smallest micro-businesses in these difficult times to avail themselves of all the rights and protections that are, rightly, in the Bill. Such a move on the part of government, should it look sympathetically on this amendment, would help to sustain small businesses, as my noble friend put it, through the often complex minefield of business-to-business relationships, where the micro-business is very much the junior player and is often open to manipulation and resource-draining tactics by more powerful players.
When it comes to negotiating business contracts, the Federation of Small Businesses has identified four areas that add up to real detriment for those businesses. It talks about a “lack of expertise” in purchasing policy, high opportunity costs of time spent making those purchasing decisions, low benefits, and little bargaining power, which I have attempted to outline.
As my noble friend said, small businesses are already treated as consumers in many parts of the European Union and in many of the regulatory areas in our own country. I simply quote the complaints handling process for the legal services and financial ombudsman—and my noble friend quoted many more areas. Therefore the Minister—whom I, too, welcome to her new post—would not be going where angels fear to tread if she was to look sympathetically on this amendment.
Baroness Wilcox (Con)
My Lords, I, too, welcome the new Minister. I know what she will go through for a while, sitting there, so she has my sympathy and I wish her great success with the Bill.
The line,
“where angels fear to tread”
is a good one for me to come in on. A long time ago, when I chaired the National Consumer Council, as it was called then, this very subject came up. Why could we not do it? Small businesses, et cetera, were referred to, but at the end of the day it was difficult to identify a small business and a consumer. A consumer, as we did then call them, looked for six particular things, and if we found that they were missing out on two, we could take their case for them. Those were: access to what it was they wanted; choice to make sure that they had it; information on it; safety; equity; and redress—very much for the individual consumer, and not for the citizen. All the rules that were made for the consumers were made for somebody consuming. We could never quite get to the point whereby we felt that we could move over into taking forward these very small businesses. It was to the small business organisations that we spoke, to see if they could look after this side of business. It is fortunate indeed for the Minister that her next Bill is the small business Bill. She might want to take this forward there.
There is only one question I would like to ask, not of the Minister, but of Her Majesty’s Opposition. They were in government for a long time; why did they not do it then?
Hallmarking
Debate between Baroness Crawley and Baroness Wilcox
Baroness Wilcox
My noble friend has long experience of being a Minister standing at this Dispatch Box and he will know that I cannot do anything about anything to do with the retail survey which is going on at the moment. However, I can assure him that one of the oldest forms of consumer protection in this country, dating back some 700 years, is going to take some moving.
Baroness Crawley
My Lords, I declare an interest as a guardian of the Birmingham Assay Office.
Baroness Crawley
Thank you. Is the Minister aware of the serious lack of confidence that the UK’s assay offices have in this rather strange and opaque process that the Government have put in place to deal with this review? Will the noble Baroness guarantee that the essential hallmarking work of the assay offices is not damaged by this process?
Baroness Wilcox
I am very happy to reassure the noble Baroness that nothing we are going to do will worry or upset the assay offices and certainly not the Birmingham office, which, after all, is the biggest office in this country doing assay work. The noble Baroness is also president of the Trading Standards Institute, so she knows this subject very well. We are worrying unnecessarily and noble Lords need to look no further than the response to the red tape challenge. We have received more than 6,000 letters of endorsement for the assay office. There is nothing to worry about at this stage.