Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Offord of Garvel

3rd reading
Tuesday 26th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to all noble Lords who have been involved in the diligent scrutiny we have given the Bill in recent months. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill will drive innovation and deliver better outcomes for consumers by addressing barriers to competition in digital markets and tackling consumer rip-offs. I am very grateful to noble Lords for the dedication, attention and time that they have given to the Bill before your Lordships’ House.

I want to express my particular appreciation to Members on the Front Benches, including the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, Lord Bassam of Brighton, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, for the courteous and constructive manner in which they have engaged with me on the Bill. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to my noble friends Lady Stowell and Lady Harding of Winscombe, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for their invaluable contributions and clarity of views both during the debate and outside it. I emphasise my gratitude to the noble Lords, Lord Faulks, Lord Tyrie, Lord Kamall, Lord Holmes of Richmond, Lord Lansley, Lord Vaizey of Didcot, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, for their detailed consideration of Part 1 of the Bill. I am very grateful to them all; they have asked important questions and given much time and energy to the Bill, and it is a better Bill for that.

My noble friend Lord Lindsay and the noble Baronesses, Lady Crawley, Lady Bakewell and Lady Hayman, have championed consumer issues, for which I am most grateful. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for raising the important issue of net zero.

On Report, the Government made a number of amendments to the Bill with regards to subscription contracts. I thank my noble friends Lord Black of Brentwood and Lord Lucas for their engagement and collaboration on these issues. I am also most grateful to my noble friend Lord Mendoza for his work in highlighting the Bill’s impact on the ability of charities to claim gift aid.

On the issue of foreign states acquiring UK news organisations, to which my noble friend Lord Parkinson has spoken, I again thank my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston and the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who so passionately highlighted the principle of freedom of the press.

I conclude by recording my gratitude for the invaluable support and assistance of my noble friend Lord Camrose. I put on the record my thanks to the Bill team, my private office, and all the officials and lawyers in the Department for Business and Trade, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Competition and Markets Authority, who have provided such thorough support and expertise. I beg to move that the Bill do now pass.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

I hesitate to rise, because I realise I am probably testing the patience of the House, having already spoken in Third Reading. I just wanted to say a couple of things.

I thank my noble friends Lord Camrose and Lord Offord on the Front Bench for their work on this Bill. As they will know, this is legislation for which the Communications and Digital Committee has been calling for several years—it started under the chairmanship of my predecessor, my noble friend Lord Gilbert. It is something that I have been pleased to take a very active involvement in, and I am very pleased to support it passing.

As we think about what this Bill is trying to achieve and why, it is worth also remembering why we in the UK are forging a different path from the ones that Europe and the US are on. In the last few days, we have seen the US DoJ launch a major anti-trust lawsuit against Apple. In the EU, the Commission is taking serious measures against some of the big tech firms to make them comply with the spirit and letter of its new Digital Markets Act. Both situations have an ominous sense of being exactly the kind of lengthy legal battles that favour big tech, which we are trying to avoid.

The House has rightly voted on a number of measures to try to ensure that our regulation can work as it is meant to, in a timely, proportionate and less confrontational manner. That is what the Government are seeking to do with this legislation.

As the Bill leaves here and enters its final stage, I emphasise two measures from among the amendments passed by this House. First, the deadline for the Secretary of State to approve CMA guidance is key in keeping things on track and avoiding concerning delays. Secondly, if the Government and the Commons cannot accept the amendments to revert the appeals process on fines back to JR standard, I hope that my noble friends within government will consider putting a clarification in the Bill that the appeals process on fines cannot be changed in ways that undermine the JR standard or open up avenues for more expansive and protracted legal challenge.

That aside, I am grateful to the Government for bringing forward this important legislation. It will mark out our regulatory regime as different from those in other parts of the world that are having such a big impact—and not necessarily in good ways.

Scotland Act 1998: Section 35 Power

Debate between Baroness Stowell of Beeston and Lord Offord of Garvel

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

The noble Baroness’s well-informed comments indicate the sensitivities that we are dealing with in Scotland and the wider UK. The Bill as its stands risks creating significant complications from two different gender recognition regimes in the UK, which could allow for more of the fraudulent or bad-faith applications that we are very worried about. Adverse effects could include impacts on the operation of single-sex spaces, particularly for women and children, whether in prisons, clubs, associations or schools. There could be adverse effects on protections for equal pay and single-sex spaces.

The question was on whether the UK Government should have engaged more with the Scottish Government in the process. We set out our concerns. The Minister for Women and Equalities met the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice before the Bill moved to stage 3 in the Scottish Parliament. In the last two to three years, the UK Government have consulted widely on the GRA. It remains the Government’s view that this legislation strikes the right balance in the protections mentioned by the noble Baroness. This was well known to the Scottish Government. All the concerns that have been raised on behalf of women’s groups and from notable folks—whether the UN special rapporteur, the independent EU expert on protection for violence against women, or the Equality and Human Rights Commission —were put to the Scottish Government, but they have continued to push ahead with this legislation.

We have not been alone in expressing concerns regarding the Bill’s impact on the Equality Act and women and girls specifically. This has been a constant issue since these proposals were first published. It is very unfortunate that those ongoing concerns were not given more weight and that the legislation was not paused to allow further discussions between the Governments.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

Does my noble friend the Minister agree that what the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, has ably demonstrated in referring to concerns about the fraudulent use of this provision is the importance of the Government and the Official Opposition being united in their position on the steps proposed by the Scottish Parliament, so that we can put on a united front as the United Kingdom Parliament in exposing that the Scottish Government are using something so profound and sensitive for political purposes and, if there is a difference of view on some of the substance of the matter, object to it on those grounds?

[Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)]

Yes, I agree with the noble Baroness. What is happening is that the boundaries of devolution are being pushed to the limit. Perhaps the architects at the time did not anticipate that we would be here on such an issue, but they put Section 35 into the Act for a reason. It was there at the start and it was voted for by the SNP. It is a means to enable devolution and allow it to work, and to allow the Scottish Parliament to act within the Scotland Act on devolved matters, but there is a requirement to examine whether they will have an impact on the rest of the United Kingdom.

When the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004—the former First Minister of Scotland at the time, the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, will know this—the Scottish Parliament gave legislative consent, through an LCM, to that Act, because it is a devolved matter. The reason they gave was the desirability of having a single coherent gender recognition regime applying uniformly across the UK, and we have not had any evidence of why the desirability of that has changed.