Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 24th October 2017 Lords Chamber

Amendments 1, 2 and 7 are a package, all linked directly to the thread of consumer protection. I hope that the Government will see them that way and see their merits. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, my name was added to the three amendments. I declare my interests as set out in the register of the House, particularly in respect of the non-life insurance industry. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, for his drafting skills—I shall make one or two points in a moment about the drafting, which I think is particularly elegant.

The dataset of 9 million telephone calls to UK cities to which the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, referred had one other gem within it: 42% of those 9 million calls were nuisance calls. That dataset was gathered over three years, so it is fairly robust and it gives the House yet another sense of how inherent this problem is in our society. We stand here today with the opportunity to do something about that.

Keith Brown MSP, the relevant Minister at Holyrood, said when the report originally came out—it is a very good quote—that:

“These calls are a serious problem that can cause both emotional and financial harm, particularly to some of our most vulnerable citizens”.


Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, pointed out, Citizens Advice Scotland, in data mining the same 9 million calls, said that four in 10 Scots had felt intimidated. That is a form of mental harm. In our society, if I do or threaten to do physical harm to people, we have protected our citizens under Section 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861—he says, looking at a noble and learned Lord—but we have been less good at protecting them from mental harm. This is one of the ways in which we can begin to redress that balance.

These are subtle amendments because they seek to empower Ministers to go along that path by way of a double trigger. The first trigger is for the SFGB to state that there is a problem worth addressing and to make a report. The second trigger is that the Secretary of State concerned can then decide, yes or no, whether to make an order. The double trigger is particularly subtle because it means the problem will be considered in a complete way. Given that, ultimately, the order will have to come here, we can be assured that there will be plenty of debate.

This mechanism, which will enable the apparatus of government to protect people, will strengthen the legislation. I can see no down side but a strong upside, given that Citizens Advice Scotland particularly noted that these nuisance calls weigh on the most vulnerable in our society.

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

I was on the Financial Exclusion Committee. When we talk about targeting the vulnerable, it is not a matter of someone taking all the numbers or addresses out of a book; it is done scientifically. These people look at the vulnerable and consider when they will be vulnerable and how they will get at them.

The amendment includes digital. We were given evidence that single, older and vulnerable people were especially targeted digitally in the middle of the night. So if they are not sleeping well and switch on their computer, what comes up? We should not think that this is just blanket coverage and some of these people picked it up. The high numbers we have been given are targeted numbers and therefore the response rate, sadly, is very high. These are the people we are trying to protect.

We would like to reduce the number of cold calls that people receive purely by chance and do not listen to, but far too high a proportion of these cold calls are listened to because they are targeted on vulnerable individuals in our society.