Business of the House

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The looks on Members’ faces and their nodding heads suggest this is quite a widespread problem, and I sympathise with my hon. Friend and his constituents, not least because I live in Cambridgeshire yet my postal address says I am in Hertfordshire and my postcode says I am in Stevenage, but I am in neither of those places—I say that with the greatest respect to Stevenage. We fought for years to get CB postcodes instead of SG postcodes and we have failed thus far. Royal Mail is very clear that there are major costs and consequences associated with trying to change the input codes and they would have to be changed all over the country, but I know that there are many Members who, with their constituents, feel this is something worth doing.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

I have recently been contacted by a constituent who expressed extreme disappointment that, having used a search engine, he had paid a third-party website for a European health card, which, he later discovered, could be provided free by the Government. I am aware that a number of Members have similar cases relating to passport issues, visas and driving licences. May we therefore have a debate into what Government can do to protect consumers from unwittingly paying for services that the Government provide for free?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes a good point and he is not the first Member to raise it at business questions recently. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott), the employment relations and consumer affairs Minister, announced on Tuesday that websites which try to pass themselves off as legitimate Government services will come under the trading standards spotlight. We have committed an additional £120,000 in this financial year to the National Trading Standards Board so that it can investigate such websites and be better equipped to take enforcement action against them. I hope that provides some reassurance to my hon. Friend and other Members. Government and Members need continuously to identify— and perhaps expose, through the kind of questions my hon. Friend has raised—the issue to our constituents so that they know they need to be careful about potentially misleading false websites.