Consumer Rights Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for speaking in the gap. I thought that I had put my name down, but there was obviously a failure to complete a digital transaction.

I congratulate the Government on the main themes of the Bill, which brings together, clarifies, consolidates and makes more transparent a lot of those rights that exist for consumers. That was a very useful job; they took a long time to get there but they are to be congratulated on it.

My main point relates to what to my noble friend Lady King just said. A Consumer Rights Bill should also alter the balance of power between providers and consumers. In a number of respects, it does not do that. I shall be as quick as I can in listing them.

Other things that the Government are doing have undermined the ability to monitor consumer detriment. The information that the Minister gave me during the passage of the Public Bodies Bill and the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill indicated a cut of 20% to Citizens Advice’s resources for dealing with precisely this area of general consumer law. We have heard that trading standards have been cut significantly across the country, in some areas by 40%. That greatly undermines their ability as enforcers.

We have also reduced the degree of national co-ordination. What used to be the OFT’s responsibility for major scams has now been devolved on to those already hard-pressed trading standards. There is no national oversight of it. Likewise, the role of consumer education and consumer information—which the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, rightly underlined—used to be with the OFT; it is now virtually nowhere except the little bits that Citizens Advice can do. The noble Baroness also referred to the inadequacies of the individual sector regulators in engaging with consumers about their rights.

My noble friend Lady King also referred to the need to set up or use the right machinery to ensure that we do not undermine what is already good about the relationships between users and providers within the public services.

The Bill provides for collective redress by consumers in one particular area: breaches of competition law. I have never understood why that cannot be extended, except by trading standards taking up the case, right across the board. A lot of these issues are collective. I have pressed successive Governments to write collective processes and collective redress into all Bills that deal with consumer matters, but we still do not have it here.

There is then the issue of alternative dispute resolution. I appreciate that the EU directive on this has yet to pass through its processes—that will be an important point—but we now have a situation where alternative dispute resolution is the main recourse. It is so difficult and expensive for many people to access the courts that the ombudsman system and parallel systems are the main way in which consumers can resolve unresolved disputes, yet we do not have an overall strategy on ADR. I should like to hear from the Minister not only how the Government propose to transpose the directive and in what timescale, but what the general direction of government thinking is. There should surely be a comprehensive system of ADR in all markets and for all consumers.

There is much that is positive in the Bill, but unless we have proper monitoring and enforcement, the fact that people may be better able to access and understand their rights will go for nothing.