Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Monday 27th October 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendment raises an interesting question, which I thought I should take the opportunity of posing to the Minister. A cursory glance at Hansard from the other place suggests that the Government’s intention is that consumer rights in this legislation should apply to consumers of public services as well as private services, which is what the amendment addresses. The question that arises refers back to the last time I attended this Committee, when we were discussing consumers’ rights in the context of digital.

With normal goods, one has the right to return them and seek a refund or replacement. I am intrigued as to how that would work with some public services. For example, does this apply to the licence fee? If I do not like what I consumed on my television, do I have the right to a refund or replacement? Of course not, but how does that work in the context of the Bill? If I have paid tuition fees and I am not satisfied with the nature of the service that I receive from a university— I hazard a guess that quite a few students might at times have problems with, for example, the amount of access they have to face-to-face tuition—am I considered, in the context of the Bill, to be a consumer with the same rights as I would have in the private sector? I should be interested to know how that plays out. Or do we, as the amendment suggests, rely on the regulator? In which case, is that all pinned down properly in the Bill?

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has said in moving the amendment. I want to address for a couple of minutes Amendment 105A, which deals with the issue of consumer representation and how it is reflected within the structures of our regulators.

In general, it is stated early in each of the relevant Acts that the regulators are there to protect, advance or reflect the interests of consumers of gas, electricity, water, telecoms or whatever it may be. Much of the drive within those regulators is indeed geared towards that. However, it is also true that a whole lot of other broader, less direct duties in relation to consumers fall to those regulators. Successive Governments have, rightly or wrongly—I will not go into that too much—placed additional responsibilities on regulators to have regard to wider issues, to long-term and short-term issues, and to social and environmental consequences, for example. One understands all this if we are to develop industry in a way that meets those wider objectives and looks after the interests of consumers.

Put gently, in some cases the duty to look after the interests of consumers, in a simple sense, has been slightly lost. Some of that reflects the fact that the personnel who form the boards and the senior management of these regulators by and large do not come from a consumer background. They come from various technocratic and business backgrounds and in some cases from an academic background and they have the expertise that is necessary to understand the industry that the regulator is dealing with. However, the voice of the consumer in a clear sense is much more difficult to identify.

Water Bill

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Thursday 6th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I will not detain the Committee too long on this one. When I saw this provision, it jumped out of the page at me because the Bill seems to delete the requirement to provide mapping of flood vulnerability. Having now checked the impact assessment and checked with the Environment Agency, I see that it is clear that the particular clause is not inappropriate in the circumstances, but I thought I would use this opportunity to ask the Minister to tell us, perhaps in writing, what maps are now statutorily required for flood risks.

This issue will arise significantly when we come to discuss, as we will do in the next day of Committee, Flood Re and the properties that are to be covered by that system. The issue also arises in terms of resilience and, for other bodies, in terms of planning decisions, as well as in issues for the insurance industry that go wider than the Flood Re system. While the section that is to be deleted may be redundant, it is important that we ensure that the resources that the Government give the Environment Agency and other bodies are sufficient to provide detailed, robust and accessible maps defining the flood risk around the country.

There is some urgency to the issue because I know that there are, to put it neutrally, constraints on the Environment Agency’s resources in this area. The agency is, probably rightly, trying to focus what resources it has on front-line services. However, if you focus on front-line services in a diminishing budget, you inevitably cut backroom services, some of which are in this area of mapping and prediction—which is done by the Environment Agency but often in conjunction with the Met Office—of where flood risk is likely to arise in future. As I said, I do not expect a detailed argument from tonight’s discussion, but I would like, before we proceed further with the Bill, an indication of what mapping is required and what resources are there to carry it out. I beg to move.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, briefly, I support my noble friend Lord Whitty in his challenge to the Government and, to some extent, the Environment Agency. At the moment, my home down in Dorset is technically under a flood alert. I can look at maps on the Environment Agency’s website and the detailed data on river levels at the station near to my home which, during this sort of scenario, are updated every few hours. In conjunction with looking at the Met Office website—because I am an experienced watcher of these things—I can predict pretty accurately whether we will flood. I am willing to put on record that I do not think we will flood over the next 24 hours. We put our floodgates up—some of them, but not all of them—but that is mostly because we could not be bothered to take them down from the last time.

This whole business is obviously very worrying for householders. I pay tribute to the Environment Agency for making all the data available so that people like me can, assuming we are online and confident enough to use those tools, make that judgment. However, it is really important that those resources are sustained and, as technology and resource allows, are improved as more and more householders, given climate change, worry more and more about their resilience for flooding.

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, when I heard the earlier debate about consolidation and clarifying legislation, I thought that this was a case in point. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, rightly spotted that, too. This amendment allows me to put something on record. The issue is about duplicate records. Our plan is to repeal Section 195 on the basis that a single record is all that is required. The Environment Agency is not aware of any request having been made for the inspection of the duplicate record required by Section 195. Of course, it will continue to maintain its primary and comprehensive sets of data, including maps. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that public access to this information can be obtained under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, or for that matter under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is a small efficiency and cost saving to the Environment Agency, without detriment to necessary data collection, maintenance or public access. I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, with details of the data held by the Environment Agency. On that basis, I hope he will be happy to withdraw his amendment.

Public Bodies (Abolition of Environment Protection Advisory Committees) Order 2012

Debate between Lord Whitty and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I probably share that view. However, the reality is that it allows more people to be engaged and to take responsibility. To that extent, I share the objectives of the Government. The only note of caution I introduce is that the processes of engagement, empowerment and partnership—all abstract terms but in day-to-day terms they mean talking to people a lot more and in a lot more detail and probably for longer than sending out signals from the centre—are time-consuming and therefore staff resources-consuming and, to some extent, money-consuming.

In other words, the big society—if one was to call it that—is not costless. In some ways, it may be more costly than more centrally directed activities and institutionalised responsibilities. At the worst end under the old system, a member of staff might well worry about the advisory committee a month before it is due to meet and write appropriate papers and probably get a decent outcome. However, this requires a year-long engagement with the bodies that are represented on those committees. So, from the point of view of agency staff resources, this does not really save money. I know its primary aim is not to save money but to come up with a better system but, nevertheless, the Explanatory Note suggests that some of the formal money will be saved. It will not be saved. It will be deployed in a more effective way and there will be, if anything, more pressure on staff than under the old system. Subject to that caveat and the fact that we will at some point review these proceedings and changes to see if they are working, I support the Minister in these orders.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I, too, support the orders. As ever, it is a delight to come back to public bodies orders and to reminisce about some of the Minister’s finest moments in the main Chamber working on that Bill. I am sure that he will recall better than I that when these bodies were discussed, my noble friend Lord Grantchester broadly welcomed the move to rationalise the system. At the heart of this is ensuring that stakeholders around fishing are properly engaged. That means not just the professional people and businesses that are dependent upon fishing and angling but the more than 6 million people who over the past two years have indulged in some form of freshwater fishing. This is an important issue for a large number of people.

My questions concern the two key areas. I pay tribute to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, whose fourth report of Session I found extremely helpful in getting my head around these orders. I start with the issue of accountability, which, as the Minister said, is the main issue about which the committee had concerns. He reminded us that its recommendation was for the Government to reconsider the need for formal monitoring and evaluation of the successor arrangements, and I welcome what he said about reviews. This is a “big society” approach, replacing a fairly complex set of statutory bodies—regional quangos, if you like—with a different form of engagement with civil society in local communities.

There is a concern that, in the absence of a formal set of structures, there will be reduced accountability, and I am sure that the review will focus on making sure that that has worked well. I would be grateful for a little more detail about how the review might work; who it might be led by, whether that person will be independent of Defra and whether the report will be published and the process transparent so that we can properly scrutinise it here in Parliament. Answers to those sorts of questions now or later would be very helpful in giving us, and the limited numbers who responded to the consultation on these orders, some comfort around the welcome announcement that the Minister made regarding the review and the positive response that he has given to the Committee, which I very much welcome.

On effectiveness, the Explanatory Memorandum talks about the need for effective local stakeholder engagement and partnership. It is clear that the money currently being spent on these sets of bodies—£225,000 and £192,000 respectively—is being reinvested in that engagement. I would be interested to know a little more about how that money might be spent. Perhaps unlike the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, I am quite an enthusiast for communication through social media. Indeed, in the recent flooding incident, one of the things that was quite striking was that these days the telephone is a far less reliable form of communication because most of us no longer just have a telephone that plugs into the wall and is powered off the little bit of power that comes out of the phone line; most of us have wireless phones that depend on mains power. If you are going through a flood, for example, you turn off that mains power and then your phone does not work. One of the advantages of using social media is that for many of us they are run off our smartphones or mobiles. It is difficult for any agency to keep up with the changes that people make to their mobile phone numbers, but engaging with apps, Twitter and even Facebook seems to be quite an effective way of adding a bit of resilience as technology changes.