Earl of Lytton
Main Page: Earl of Lytton (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)Consumer Rights Bill
Earl of Lytton Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, I had not intended to intervene and before doing so I ought to explain that, as a latecomer to the issues in this Bill, I have various interests to declare, not least in this instance that I am a chartered surveyor and, by dint of my professional activities, a registered valuer.
I pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, in connection with negative equity, for example, and I think of the circumstances that arose when the wheels, if I can term it thus, came off the banking situation and mortgage lending in 2008. That resulted in the mortgage lenders—I will not say to a man, but certainly in large numbers—pointing the finger at valuer members of my profession. I should make it clear that the mortgage lenders select whom they will have on their panel of valuers, they set out the form in which the report is to be made, they determine the fee and the timescale over which the report will be produced and, in the past, they have not been averse to leaning on members of my profession if they think that not enough money is being lent or the volume is not enough, because they are looking retrospectively at what are provable data from concluded evidence in the market.
It is my experience that mortgage lenders and banks generally are very adroit at passing the buck back to members of my profession. I do not set out to defend property valuers from whatever mistakes they might make. However, I counsel caution because there are some very big players who are very in tune with passing back to some other sector what would otherwise be their duty of care to the consumer. I will be developing aspects of this when we get to my amendments.
I wonder how one can ring-fence out the question of what we might call the contractor or the service provider and their subcontractor arrangements in those circumstances. I do not have a solution to this issue. Professional bodies, such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, are there for the purposes of providing education, continuing professional development and ensuring the ethical conduct of their members. The RICS is not a consumer protection organisation as such, nor does it have the ability to scrutinise and quality control the hundreds of thousands of different reports and valuations that are being produced by its members. This is a matter of concern because of the net result that occurs.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors introduced a valuer registration scheme—and I am a registered valuer—in response to the very large number of claims that have been made against valuer members of the RICS following 2008. Quite a number of people who were previously in that field have left it. As a result, the cost of getting regulated purpose valuations has fallen to fewer people and costs have gone up. That has reduced competition and increased costs. I am not sure that that is in anybody’s long-term interest—certainly not if, as we now perceive, the market might be subject to a revitalisation. We need this volume: we need those willing persons to come forward and do this valuation work.
So I counsel caution. As I said before, I do not have a solution, but I hope that perhaps the Minister will be able to throw some light on that.
Baroness Drake
My Lords, I support Amendment 46B. I have spoken frequently on the issue of fiduciary duty and the strengthening of the duty of care in the financial services sector, and I suspect there are some other pieces of legislation and changes taking place where I may deliver the same emotive plea. I feel that Governments—I stress “Governments”—consistently fail to address the systemic challenge that exists in the financial services market.
I was looking up some old debates, reminding myself how I can iterate at great length about my concerns on standards of duty in the financial services sector. I turned to the speech that the noble Lord, Lord Turner, made when we debated the Pensions Bill that came through the House earlier this year. At that time he had just ceased to be chair of the FSA. I knew from the past that he had had reasonably strong views about the efficiencies or inefficiencies of the financial market. When I reread it yesterday, I remembered the power of his remarks when he referred to,
“the fundamental inefficiency of the market … It is a system absolutely shot through with market failure where the process of trying to provide in a competitive fashion simply does not work well”.—[Official Report, 15/1/14; col. GC160.]
That is why the argument for strengthening the duty of care and fiduciary duty in the financial services sector is so compelling. There have been so many recent reports on different sections of the financial services sector which have identified parts of the market that could not be expected to self-remedy and there is an urgent need to strengthen the position of the consumer and to intrude.
I welcome the strengthenings in the Bill, but there is still an avoidance of strengthening the duty, particularly in the financial services sector, towards the consumer. Parts of the sector are characterised by systemic conflicts of interest. We have complexities that are debated endlessly in both Houses. We have asymmetry of knowledge and understanding and inertia and behavioural bias in the customer. Those all combine to build inefficiencies in the financial services market that are profitable to the provider but detrimental to the consumer. Regulatory reliance on compliance with rules, rather than placing responsibility on the financial service provider to act in the consumer’s interests, consistently fails to deliver not only for the consumer but for the economy as a whole. The financial sector is such a large part of that economy. If that sector has market inefficiencies, that is a pretty large chunk of the economy as a whole.
I frequently say to myself, “How many reports on failure in the financial services market do the Government have to receive before they do not just write another set of rules?” They have a game changer in terms of the rules of the game. How many considered views, such as those from the Kay review or the Law Commission, do they need before the Government accept that a strengthened duty of care is needed in this sector? My noble friend Lady Hayter said, shortly before we came into the Moses Room, “I hope you have lots of examples, Jeannie”. I thought, “If I go down that road, I could entertain the Committee for about four hours”.
Let me headline some of them. There are excessive foreign exchange charges when investing in assets overseas. There are heavy exit charges from financial contracts, which will be a big issue given the new freedom for pensions when people trot along to say, “Can I have my cash please?”, and get slapped down. The Government have identified that as a problem, but it is still there. There are hidden investment charges. Not all investment products are pensions; plenty are not and they will not all be covered by the new quality standards in the pensions Bill. A lot of transfers will take place; transfer charges are unlikely to be covered by the pensions Bill, but we know that that is one of the high-charging areas. Everyone knows that income drawdown charges are high. I have no idea how the Government are going to control income drawdown products to make them fair to the consumer in the new freedom regime. There is the mis-selling of PPI, harsh mortgage contracts and the miserable, mean activity of interest swap arrangements sold to small businesses to protect them against interest rate rises, when those policies became so burdensome that it threatened their survival. The list is endless.
I thought that I would illustrate the point with a pensions example, which is a personal one. My daughter is a lawyer, so you would expect her to be reasonably cerebrally functioning—if I can be generous to the profession. She changed her job from one employer to another. She had a DC pot and I suggested that she should get organised to transfer her DC pot from her previous to her new employer. Her way of dealing with that was to put all the paperwork on my desk and say, “You sort it out, Mum, and I’ll sign”. As all mothers do, I sat down with the paperwork. The pension scheme she was leaving was provided by a leading, reputable financial company, as was the one she was going to. Both were blue-chip companies. I read all the paperwork of the one she was leaving and of the one she was going to. Not a single piece of paper set out the charges for any part of the investment, any part of the administration or any part of the transfer charges. Tucked away was an invite to apply at a certain point if you wanted the detail of those charges. That was just one example where the market is just not working.
I do not suppose that in the Committee today I have the slightest chance of persuading the Government that they at some point need to change the rules of the game to place a greater duty of care on the financial services sector, but otherwise we will go on receiving endless reports of market failures and inefficiencies. We have a big juggernaut coming down the line with pension freedoms. When people take their cash, they will not necessarily be trotting off to the regulated products covered by the FCA; they will also be operating in the unregulated part of the market. I put the case again that there is really a need to strengthen the duty of care in the sector so that the consumer can truly be protected.
The Earl of Lytton
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 48 and 49, which are in the same group. I wish to address the issues of consumers and contractors or providers with specific reference to the area I know best, which is property services. I am a provider of such services; I am a small business. Not only do I provide services myself but I also provide a certain amount of service in trying to sort out the wreckage of consumers’ arrangements with others, because I deal with a certain amount of dispute-related cases.
I know what it is like to be misled as a consumer. I also know what it is like to be taken advantage of as a provider. I had that very much in mind, echoing the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, made a short while ago about professional standards. I am old-fashioned. I was brought up to understand that the hallmark of a professional meant that one put the interests of one’s client before one’s own interest. That did not necessarily equate with putting what the client thought their interests were before all else; that is, of course, a different metric. Consumers come in all shapes and sizes, as I know from a long time in the property business. They can be old and cunning, or young, wealthy and spoiled, or just greedy and opportunistic, as well as entirely honourable and decent. Over 90% of consumers are wholly honest in their approach—as are, I am certain, over 90% of service providers. In my view, there is more honest misunderstanding than deliberate malpractice, but I acknowledge that there are some that are consistent cheats—even some very large suppliers. I am not going to name any that I have come across.
We need not to lose sight of the objective of facilitating honest trade and reducing bureaucracy, but we need to be careful about assuming a level of competence among consumers that is often lacking in practice. The principle of protecting the weaker party by legal means does not equate with protecting the consumer at all costs, regardless of circumstances. Some consumers are not only clueless but unaware of their own ignorance in insisting that certain things be done in certain ways—or, to put it more crudely, insisting on a particular price above all costs. Ultimately, it is not for Parliament to protect people, whether consumers or providers, from their own incompetence or stupidity. I will get on to that when I get to the detail of my amendments, with a suggestion as to how it might be addressed.
We must not give rights without insisting on parallel duties, because we all have duties as providers and as consumers. One of the most frequently forgotten about is disclosing material facts relating to the transaction that is in contemplation. The Minister referred to the painter of the bathroom. I would like to refer to the failure of the consumer to maintain a functioning extractor fan. I frequently have to visit modern buildings with high levels of insulation due to problems with condensation, which is mostly to do with the lifestyle of the occupant as opposed to the inherent nature of the building. I say that with some knowledge of members of my own family failing to understand that principle. The Minister will then understand where I am coming from. There are some quite serious issues here that have real-world effects: mouldy clothes, bad living conditions or whatever it may be.
My amendments came to me originally from the Construction Industry Council. I have a professional involvement with that body but I am not a member of it. I want to address the issues in Amendments 47 and 48 because the principle behind them is that not all consumers act fairly towards traders. Some consumers are not rational and can be vindictive. They can believe that they must be right beyond peradventure, regardless of the facts of the case. The council pointed out the case of Walter Lilly & Co Ltd v Mackay from 2012, which was heard in the Technology and Construction Court.
There is a language issue, which the Minister touched on earlier, as I understood her, that consumers may well not understand the jargon or technicality of what is being said by a supplier or some specialist. We all have jargon but one thing that is often misunderstood is the effect of health and safety in carrying out contracts of works. It can escalate costs because of the need, for instance, for scaffolding to replace a gutter or something of that sort. Consumers do not necessarily understand that, so when there is a provision for plant and machinery at cost, they do not necessarily twig that some significant items may be involved.
It seems from the terms of the Bill that the consumer appears to be able to rely on his own fairly subjective memory of what was said, regardless of whether it is near or far from the truth. I worry about that. When one thinks of the studies on the accuracy of witness recall of the facts in the wider judicial system, one can see that there is a real problem. That is not limited to consumers; it may be an affliction of the small business as provider of the service. The CIC pointed out to me that the remedies introduced in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act—rights to receive payment and bring disputes to adjudication—are not available to traders if dealing with a residential occupier. Maybe we ought to look at that.
I would hate these things to end up in the courts because I am a believer that there is only one profession that gets rich by that process and that it leads to a lasting impoverishment of others. Most particularly at risk is the hapless consumer himself. He sees no other way and is encouraged or goaded to go to court. It would be my objective to keep people out of the courts if at all possible.
The logical consequence of not having the words that I suggested incorporated into the Bill will be reams and reams of terms and conditions of engagement which, in all probability, whether they are written in large or small print, nobody will read. We will be back where we were before without an adequate remedy other than pursuing these things very expensively. That is why I wish, by Amendments 47 and 48, to insert the test of “reasonably”. The courts have some experience of unpicking the term “reasonable”. I am against their having to determine such matters at all because very often it is not cost-effective to deal with them in that way.
Amendment 49 is slightly different. The Bill refers to the representations, if I can loosely term them as such, made at the same time. A contractor goes along to pitch for a job with a consumer. He makes various representations, or is deemed to do so, but it may in a sense be a discussion around the issue, trying to refine what the consumer wants and what services will be provided. The contractor goes away and sets it down in writing. It would appear that subsequently setting something down in writing that is different from what was said on site at the first meeting would not exonerate the contractor from having to abide by what he had first said. So I am afraid that we get back to the unedifying spectacle of, “He said this”, “No he didn’t”, which a court is unable to unpick in practice.
The CIC’s briefing note to me referred to an example in which a builder or engineer recommends a particular type of foundation based on the information that he had at the time. It is then found, when they get on site, that some different situation applies; perhaps the ground conditions are not as the initial geotechnical investigation identified. After all, we are in many cases talking about a process, not a bolt of lightning that hits in a moment of time and fixes everything. This is an ongoing transactional process, particularly in the building world. The CIC—and I agree with it—feels that it would be unreasonable for a customer to be able to hold a contractor to the original statement if the contractor set out to clarify that within a short period thereafter. That is why I seek to insert the words,
“or as soon as possible thereafter”.
That is the logic behind it.
I said that I would touch on where I might depart from the CIC’s script, perhaps as a sort of final postscript. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, may also see some merit in this. Ultimately, I have suggested a sticking plaster here, but what is really required is a reliable, timely, locally based, informed, mandatory, affordable and authoritative adjudication system of some sort. If you have that in place, you remove most of the chancers from the equation and get back to some form of even-handed thing that does not grow over months and years like little Johnny’s porridge in the mouth, resulting in a complete system failure, whereby access to some sort of resolution is denied for so long that, even if you did get something in your favour, it would be functionally worthless.
We have a model—and I claim some credit for having brought such a thing in—although it would not be perfectly applied pari passu to this particular instance. In 1996, your Lordships passed the Party Wall etc. Act and I had the privilege of taking it through all its stages in this House. In passing, I pay tribute to Sir Sydney Chapman, who took it through all its stages in the other place. He has just died, and I express my appreciation in his memory, and to his family, for the work that was done. I believe that that model could be made better use of so that there was no risk of huge fees being run up, and that sort of thing. We need to get away from having to deal with these things through the courts. If we are not going to have an ombudsman, there needs to be something else in place to deal with it—and there are ways of dealing with it.
Having explained at length, first, where I am coming from, secondly, the meaning of the specifics of the amendments and, thirdly, a suggestion of how things might be dealt with in future, I beg to move.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, first, I thank the noble Earl for his thoughtful and very clear contribution to the debate. I share his sympathy for the untimely death of Sir Sydney Chapman. I also agree that the vast majority of consumers and service providers are honest but, regrettably, there are some on both sides who would not meet that description.
Perhaps I may look at the three amendments by taking a step back. Clause 50 is the result of careful consideration, as I said. We have thought and listened hard, consulting on it and publishing it in the draft Bill. We have sought to achieve the delicate balance between giving consumers the right to have what they pay for and not overburdening traders. To do that, we have given consumers a clear statutory right: the right that information that they are given and which they take into account is complied with.
Crucially, there are three safeguards for traders. It may help if I set them out. First, this right does not cover every bit of information given to a consumer by a trader. It is limited to information that the consumer took into account when making a purchase or making a decision about it—for example, if a consumer contracted for a service specifically because the trader said it would be done in a certain way. Secondly, it would be for the consumer to prove that they took the information into account if seeking to enforce this right against the trader. Thirdly, we are allowing traders to qualify information given. The trader can qualify information as long as, where they do so after the occasion when it was first given, the consumer is happy with the new information. For example, if a salesperson gives information over the phone in good faith but later, as more details of the consumer’s circumstances emerge, they need to change it, then they can do so as long as the consumer agrees.
We think that those safeguards are enough to address concerns that noble Lords have mentioned. For example, we have heard concerns that sales advisers will have to speak strictly to a script. That will not be the case, because of the safeguards that I have just outlined. We are not restricting the trader’s ability to discuss options with the consumer or making them stick to jargon, in the words of the noble Earl. We are saying that when a trader gives information which the consumer may take into account in deciding whether to make a purchase or make a decision about it, the trader needs to comply with that information.
On spurious claims, we do not think that there is an assumption that consumers remember information. I know from my experience that you cannot assume that consumers remember information; one sometimes forgets things. That is not what the clause states. Clause 50 provides that where a trader has given information that the consumer has relied on, the trader must comply with that information. The consumer will need to prove that the information was given and that they relied on it. Those safeguards—that the burden of proof is on the consumer and that the consumer must have relied on the information—in my view protect traders from unreasonable claims. Unfortunately, some consumers will, as the noble Earl said, act unreasonably. They are not the vast majority. Most consumers of services simply want the service to be provided to the required standard, with access to redress if things go wrong. That is what this chapter provides.
Turning to Amendments 47 and 48, the safeguards that I have explained achieve a balance between traders and consumers. Adding a reasonableness test to the clause would, in our view, cause confusion and uncertainty. There are some places in legislation where reasonableness is an appropriate test. However, I fear that it would add complexity here, which would not benefit consumers or traders. When we consulted in 2012, the vast majority of respondents thought that the existing law on services was too complex.
That brings me to Amendment 49. As I explained a moment ago, we are allowing traders to make changes to information given. While subsection 2(a) allows the trader to qualify information on the occasion when he gives it, subsection 2(b) allows the trader to make changes at a later date if the consumer agrees to those changes. That achieves clarity for both parties, so we think it is an appropriate balance.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, also mentioned adjudication. We have already talked a lot about alternative dispute resolution in the debates on the Bill. ADR will be available in all sectors covered by the EU directive from next year. While I sympathise with much of what my noble friend has said, given the safeguards I have outlined, I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that explanation. I will go away and think about it. The words about what the consumer takes into account when making a decision are pivotal. I would simply leave a question in the air: objectively, how would anyone know, other than the consumer himself? How would one test that? This is not the time to pursue this, even if we were not in Grand Committee. I will ponder what the Minister said and I may return to this at a later stage. I may well write to her with some more focused issues between now and the next stage, although I cannot guarantee that, for all sorts of reasons. That said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness King of Bow
My Lords, Amendment 48B would ensure that full costs are provided to consumers before the sale takes place, and that these include any non-negotiable charges and fees. Amendment 50G, which is also in this group, would stop traders charging people to complain by removing charges for helplines and complaint facilities.
The issue is a real scourge for all consumers, and it has probably happened to all of us here. We see adverts offering cheap broadband deals, or we try to book cinema tickets or decide to go to a concert. We look at the headline figure, which lures us in, and decide that it is a sum that we are willing to pay. On that basis, we spend our time—it is important to remember that time is money—going through the process of purchase. As we all know, this is increasingly done online.
I had something of a new experience the other day—I never usually buy Christmas presents earlier than Christmas Eve—when I received an e-mail from a trader advertising a concert that I knew my mother would just love. It was for Paul Simon. Do we not all love Paul Simon? Would everyone in this Room not want to go and listen to Paul Simon? I thought, “My goodness, it is only September, but I might be lured into buying my mum her Christmas present”. The headline figures advertised for the seats I wanted were between £60 and £100. I ummed and aahed, because that is a lot of money, but as my noble friend says, my mum is a nice lady. I had a L'Oréal moment—“Because she’s worth it”—and, obviously, I had to get her two tickets. She lives in France, so I had to check easyJet flight availability, and I spent ages on price comparison websites to check whether there were cheaper tickets available, then I went back to the original website to see what the tickets would be, what the visibility was and so on.
Finally, after about an hour I decided that, yes, it is really expensive, but it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for my mum and I will also have got her Christmas present sorted out in September, which would also be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. I pressed the purchase button and was utterly gobsmacked when the price that popped up for these two tickets was £60 greater than the price quoted all the way through. I was enraged; I realised I had been conned. I had expected what we all expect—maybe a £1.50 booking charge, but £60 is just ridiculous. I realised that all the price comparison checking I had done over the previous hour was meaningless because this website gave you the full price, the real price, only when the sale was being transacted—in other words, once you are entering credit card details. I am terribly ashamed to say that I bought the tickets, though it was clearly a complete con.
The point is that this amendment, and this group, is about giving consumers transparent data so that they can make an informed choice. It is about ensuring that traders give the total cost of a service, including all the non-negotiable charges and fees that they add on at the end. If this does not happen, it is simply not cricket—it is not fair. The same goes for Amendment 50G, which seems like a basic point of fairness. Consumers should not be charged exorbitant helpline fees or forced to pay for costly 0800 numbers and others, just so that they can complain. It seems like common sense and basic fairness to make these changes. I beg to move.
The Earl of Lytton
My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the amendment, but I am not sure that I would advocate it in this form. I am very familiar with the cost of something being “from £X” and you find you have to order three dozen of whatever it is in order to get the £X. That has always been a bone of contention for me. Where I depart from the noble Baroness is when it comes to an area of my own expertise, which I shall use as an example.
In party-wall cases, where people want to undertake certain work to their building, they have to serve a notice on the adjoining owner, and if the adjoining owner does not agree, then the parties have to appoint surveyors to deal with the matter for them. That takes the two neighbours out of the frame, which is part of how the thing is designed to work. The person proposing the work is obliged under the legislation to meet the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner, which may include their professional fees. When a surveyor is faced with this situation, as I frequently am, it may be a building owner but it is normally an adjoining owner who rings up and says, “I have been served with a notice by our neighbour and I think I need a surveyor”. Assuming that it is a case which needs a surveyor and that they are not best advised to agree to the thing and let their neighbour get on with it, there is then the question of how to structure the fee that is dealt with.
There is a European directive on the provision of services. I forget its precise name, but I am sure that the Minister will know about it—I will find out if necessary and write to her. One of the things in it refers to the cost of the service provided or the manner of calculating it shall be set out—I do not know whether I am quoting that verbatim but it is something along those lines—along with all the other things, including the identity of the trader, the time taken to deliver the service and that sort of thing. The difficulty is that, until one gets on site, one does not necessarily know what one is faced with. You may take on a job and then find that the person promoting the work has a fly-by-night builder but has no engineer on site, yet they are doing things involving some quite serious construction that affects, for instance, party walls or adjacent excavation in an urban environment. You may conclude that they are not doing it safely. They may also have as their surveyor someone who is not that experienced and does not know what is supposed to be done. Then you end up having to hold the hand of the other person’s surveyor.
All this can run up costs which one did not anticipate at first, so providing full details of the total cost of the service in that instance would be nigh-on impossible. However, providing the mechanism for calculating it is perfectly reasonable. It so happens that, under party-wall legislation, the building owner carrying out the works is obliged to refund only the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner. There is that fall-back and it is obviously up to the surveyor to justify the reasonableness of whatever it may be—the hourly charge, the amount of travel, the frequency of visits and everything else. However, the total costs in such circumstances would be extremely difficult to pin down.
That might also happen in any other construction-related job where there are a number of variables and where, typically, you will have provisional sums in a building contract to cover certain things. Those might be based on a prime cost or just a spot figure, but they are subject to a demonstration of the amount of man-hours and materials that have gone into the job at the end of the day. Sometimes I get called in, as do colleagues, to try to deal with situations where the amount claimed is unreasonable because a contractor has an add-only calculator or the consumer is on a fixed budget and cannot agree to anything that exceeds it, and so on.
The idea is to get to having provisions that deal with the real world of things. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady King, has rightly pointed to a situation where you buy a product, such as the tickets to the theatre or whatever it is. Inevitably, services do not necessarily quite fall into that category. Yes, you can get a fixed price for doing your bathroom floor—I am sorry to go on about bathrooms but your Lordships get the drift—but other things are not capable of being drilled down to that degree of finesse. I would advise a bit of caution and flexibility in the overall approach.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness. Who wants to upset their mother? My mother-in-law is 95 tomorrow; I am taking her to see “War Horse” and I have paid the surplus on the tickets, so I understand the point. I am particularly interested in Amendment 50G because you might be left on these phones for a long time while trying to enforce your rights. That is an interesting matter for the Minister. There may be existing legislation to deal with that issue but it is worth following through.
I am much more concerned about Amendment 48B, the lead amendment, because its wording seems to run exceptionally widely. Thinking about how this might work, to take another example, you may buy a service as part of a package of services and not wish to buy all that package at once. An alarm for your house might be a plain alarm but you might have sensors or lights outside. You might or might not have it connected to a central station. It might be wireless or with a cable. You buy the basic system and later decide to upgrade it. You have the same service, but I am not clear what the requirement would be for a supplier of such equipment to fulfil any additional services fees or charges that could be incurred by the buyer. The buyer could incur quite a lot of charges if they chose to make changes along the way. Would they then be able to use this measure as a basis for defaulting on or changing the contract?
I found the wording potentially rather alarmingly wide. What the Government have in Clause 50(1) as it stands deals with the issues which I think are in the back of the noble Baroness’s mind. Proposed new subsection (1B) in Amendment 48B contains the word “portrayed”. If the information is to be portrayed for an internet purchase, which is the example that the noble Baroness gave, that is going to be quite difficult.
Although I have sympathy with Amendment 50G, I think that Amendment 48B is probably redundant, and the Minister may well say that Amendment 50G is covered by another piece of legislation.