Consumer Rights Bill

Baroness Wilcox Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I simply wish to add my support to my noble friend’s amendment. We know that there are more than 4 million small businesses in the UK today. I am sure that we would all agree that they are the lifeblood of the economy. They account for well over 90% of all enterprises and employ up to 14 million people. We know that we live in very difficult economic times; that is the case for millions of our fellow country men and women. We also know that the vast majority of people who move from unemployment into employment go through the private sector and the small business sector.

This amendment put forward by my noble friend gives us an opportunity to assist those smallest micro-businesses in these difficult times to avail themselves of all the rights and protections that are, rightly, in the Bill. Such a move on the part of government, should it look sympathetically on this amendment, would help to sustain small businesses, as my noble friend put it, through the often complex minefield of business-to-business relationships, where the micro-business is very much the junior player and is often open to manipulation and resource-draining tactics by more powerful players.

When it comes to negotiating business contracts, the Federation of Small Businesses has identified four areas that add up to real detriment for those businesses. It talks about a “lack of expertise” in purchasing policy, high opportunity costs of time spent making those purchasing decisions, low benefits, and little bargaining power, which I have attempted to outline.

As my noble friend said, small businesses are already treated as consumers in many parts of the European Union and in many of the regulatory areas in our own country. I simply quote the complaints handling process for the legal services and financial ombudsman—and my noble friend quoted many more areas. Therefore the Minister—whom I, too, welcome to her new post—would not be going where angels fear to tread if she was to look sympathetically on this amendment.

[Baroness Wilcox (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the new Minister. I know what she will go through for a while, sitting there, so she has my sympathy and I wish her great success with the Bill.

The line,

“where angels fear to tread”

is a good one for me to come in on. A long time ago, when I chaired the National Consumer Council, as it was called then, this very subject came up. Why could we not do it? Small businesses, et cetera, were referred to, but at the end of the day it was difficult to identify a small business and a consumer. A consumer, as we did then call them, looked for six particular things, and if we found that they were missing out on two, we could take their case for them. Those were: access to what it was they wanted; choice to make sure that they had it; information on it; safety; equity; and redress—very much for the individual consumer, and not for the citizen. All the rules that were made for the consumers were made for somebody consuming. We could never quite get to the point whereby we felt that we could move over into taking forward these very small businesses. It was to the small business organisations that we spoke, to see if they could look after this side of business. It is fortunate indeed for the Minister that her next Bill is the small business Bill. She might want to take this forward there.

There is only one question I would like to ask, not of the Minister, but of Her Majesty’s Opposition. They were in government for a long time; why did they not do it then?