Draft Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (Security Requirements for Relevant Connectable Products) Regulations 2023

Debate between Lord Mackinlay of Richborough and Stella Creasy

Monday 11th September 2023 General Committees

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I do not wish to detain the Committee for long, but it strikes me that it would be useful to make a couple of observations, not least that I find myself in substantial agreement with the previous speaker about the importance of this issue.

[Craig Mackinlay]

First time for everything.

[Stella Creasy]

There are so many stopped clocks around this building at this point in time. I am also now fascinated to see what will come up on my Facebook adverts as a result of the hon. Gentleman’s speech. I suspect I will be getting many about lightbulbs, and Farrow and Ball paints—people can make their own jokes out of that.

I have a few simple questions for the Minister. So far, we have talked about products and the regulation of them, but we have not talked about consumers and consumer experiences. The elephant in the room is Brexit. After all, we were signed up to regulations that were shared across a massive consumer group of 550 million consumers, which meant that we had weight when negotiating with manufacturers. Now we are not, and we are bringing in our own regulations. Whatever one thinks of that decision, it means that there will potentially be some anomalies for consumers, unless our consumers never leave this country, whether to go to Northern Ireland or to mainland Europe. Can the Minister say a little about whether the draft regulations will have an impact on guarantees on consumer standards?

In particular, a lot of people will look at the exchange rate and try to get a better deal by buying goods overseas. What will the measures mean for consumers who might want to use any of these items on their holidays? People might take a baby monitor with them, or if their watches break they might walk into an Apple store in a foreign country and ask for help. What will our having a different set of regulations mean? Should we buy an item overseas to use it here? Could the companies tell us that we have voided our guarantees because we have bought a good in a different territory, where there are different regulations and therefore potentially different software components?

Has the Minister had any conversations with his colleagues about the requirements under the Consumer Rights Act 2015? The consumer protection regulations were written at a time when we all abided by a common framework of regulations, which meant that consumers did not need to worry about these things. Now we are going it alone, so when we go overseas or bring things here from overseas, there will inevitably be conflict and confusion. The Minister said a lot about the companies and the regulations; he has not said as much about the actual consumers—our constituents—who might suddenly find that “Computer says no” repeatedly, and not know to whom they can turn to do anything about it.