Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Baroness Kramer and Lord Kamall

Report stage
Monday 11th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

Please.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness. I am afraid that was the opposite of chivalry.

I want to speak to Amendment 153, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tyrie. He and I have had a number of conversations about this. I refer noble Lords to my interests as set out in the register. Having written about competition law at EU level and taken part in debates on competition issues in the European Parliament during my many years there, I was very torn between the merits appeal and the judicial review. I was tempted by the idea from my friend in the other place, the right honourable Robert Buckland, of possibly a time-limited merits appeal.

Many of us fell down on the side of judicial review because the small firms, the challenger firms, were asking for it. They believed that it was quicker and more effective. We hope that it will be. That is why many of us have supported this. But we have to ask: what if we are wrong? We do not have perfect information. What if judicial review takes longer than envisaged? Some noble Lords have said to me that the Joint Committee of Parliament that the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, proposed would be much more effective in holding the CMA to account and ensuring that there is not a repetition of cases being restarted because they lost at JR. That argument has some merit.

However, we must take a step back and realise that, given that none of us has perfect information, we should be aware of the notion of unintended consequences. I have written about this a number of times over the years for think tanks. Often a well-intentioned government intervention that is supposed to make things better, which many people support at the time and that makes sense and looks like it will work does not turn out how it is supposed to but makes things worse.

In that spirit, I have been thinking about how we make better laws. How do we ensure that there are safeguards in place for unintended negative consequences? How do we make some redress to ensure that we change course, having thought that we were on the right course but having made things worse by not recognising the unintended consequences? In Committee, I said that I had considered tabling an amendment for a review after three or five years, or whatever. However, I am concerned that this would be seen as a loophole by the big companies, which would then hold off in order to show that JR was not working so that they could go back to merits appeal.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, has solved that problem in many ways with Amendment 153. It is right that we have a review of all legislation to ensure that it has worked out as was intended and so that where there are unintended, unforeseen consequences, when it did not work as we had envisaged, we have those safeguards. A good way of doing that would be to have reviews of legislation such as the one that the noble Lord proposes here, to ensure that we could change course if it did not turn out how we intended.

I hope it will do. I hope judicial review will work. I hope it will be much quicker and we will have a much more competitive market. I hope the challengers will grow stronger, we will have more competition and see creative disruption and new challengers at every stage and consumers benefiting. Amendment 153 says, “Let’s make sure that we take stock to see whether legislation—particularly a Bill as important as this—works out as we want it to”. That is why I support Amendment 153.