Consumer Rights Bill

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend in this. I cannot understand why the utilities feel that they might incur huge costs in sending out paper bills. After all, they tell us how easy it is to use, how much better it is to use. Well, then, their customers will be convinced and they will do it that way. Of course, some will not, because, as my noble friends have said, not everybody at the moment has access to the internet. There are a number of elderly people, in particular, who find it difficult to manage it. Yes, they will move on in due course; why can we not decently wait for them to do so, and be replaced by all these vibrant, young people who can manage such things?

I also have some reservations about how one actually speaks to organisations such as utilities, which have now become terribly efficient, when you want to do something which is not exactly in the line of what they have anticipated. Of course, there is a phone number for you to ring, is there not? You then find you are speaking to a computer and the computer does not understand what you are saying, because what you are asking has not been programmed into it. Why should those of us who do not want to go down this modern route have to pay for those costs?

If I sound a bit edgy about this, it is because I had a problem yesterday with one organisation. I shall not mention which one, out of kindness. I rang the telephone number and, after a while, I could see that all I was doing was increasing my telephone bill. In some irritation I put my coat on and walked to their office in town. I stood in a queue, waiting to meet a human, and eventually I found a human. She was very helpful and said, “Oh, I can deal with that. I can get you a print-off”. She gave me a print-off and I came back quite pleased. I sat down and then realised that the print-off was not for the dates which I had asked for. So I put my coat on again and walked back.

This is a story of our times—dealing with these people. I find it extremely irritating that the programme is always right and the customer is always wrong. For that reason, I shall support my noble friend tonight. As I say, if we are wrong, and if it is such a beautiful system which all the utilities have introduced, it will not be a problem for them, because nobody will want to do it the way that my noble friend has suggested and all will be well—but I suspect that it will not be.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness in her attempt to get equal rights for consumers who want to have paper bills. It is about consumer rights. The utilities are huge. It is quite right that it is cheaper for them to send the e-mail. It is not cheaper for the very poor and the vulnerable, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, pointed out to us. In the work that I do in social welfare, it is the poorer end, people in poverty and the vulnerable elderly who often do not have family who can do the direct debit for them who actually end up paying more of the bill. What I cannot understand is: if it is going to cost the utilities so much more to send these people paper, why do they constantly send me every week a bit of paper that says, “I think you should know that if you change your supplier, you can save two and thruppence a week,” or whatever it is—I am going back a bit and using that to give a picture of how people view these things.

We can remember that, many years ago, there was an attempt to phase out cheques. That was changed because so many older people could not manage their accounts without having a cheque. As the noble Lord said, as we all die out—all those people who are not in this computer age—there will not be a difficulty because all our children and young people are taught computing at school and use computers all the time. But the costs must be minimal, compared to the vast amounts being made by utilities, to enable people who are poor and vulnerable to manage their finances in a visible and transparent way that they can understand. That surely is what we should be looking for in consumer rights.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, may I interject a word on this amendment, on which I have spoken before, by way of an Oral Question? To insist that everything is online and more expensive if one opts out is to penalise the poorest and oldest in society. We are always talking about the gap between the better off and the worse off. To ensure that the poorest and oldest—who are least likely to have computers and all the expense that attaches to them—should be penalised is quite wrong. In 50 years from now, I am sure that things will be very different, but we have to cope with where we are today. This amendment is eminent good sense.