Consumer Rights Bill

Iain McKenzie Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good point about supply chains, but does he not agree that those who operate supply chains have a duty and responsibility to monitor them at regular intervals to ensure that they live up to the quality and standard of the product at the end of the chain that they will be delivering?

[George Freeman]

The hon. Gentleman pre-empts precisely the point I was about to make about balance in supply chains. The manufacturer at the end of the supply chain has a duty to understand, monitor, measure and take responsibility for the supply chain, but we also need to provide for consumers to exercise their rights and understand the supply chain.

I want to talk about the two areas I have most experience of: the Government’s industrial strategies for life sciences and agricultural technologies. The central thrust of the agri-tech and food strategy, which we launched last summer, is that corporate interests in reducing costs and dependence on agrochemicals, energy and labour are now very much aligned with consumer interests and demand for increasingly green food with low-carbon, low-plastics and low-water footprints. The challenge in global agriculture is how to measure those inputs and communicate to consumers clearly and simply at the point of purchase that the thing they are buying comes with a low-carbon and low-water footprint. A proper system for measuring that will also make Britain a leader in the technologies required to hit those targets. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys), who has done a lot of work on resilience in supply chains and the importance of this agenda. I suspect we will get the benefit of her comments in a moment.

That agenda applies equally in the field of medicine. The challenge of discovering drugs for modern patient groups has seen the industry reinvent itself and move away from spending 15 years and $1 billion on developing a blockbuster drug that it can present to Governments as working for everybody. The more we know about disease, genomics and different patient groups, the more we know that different people get the same disease in different ways, and the challenge is to help the industry develop drugs around the patients whom we know will benefit. Then we can give the right drugs to the right people, instead of wasting drugs and having to set dosages at levels that make drugs ineffective in those for whom they work well in order to prevent side effects in those for whom they do not.

That agenda is driving a completely different way of discovering drugs—one where the NHS works with patients—and creating extraordinary opportunities for the UK to lead the world in providing targeted and ultimately personalised medicine, but it requires a different way of thinking about patient rights. We need to think of patients as having the right to be involved in NHS research; to access the best medicines available; and to access and use data, both personalised and anonymised, to support research. I understand that the Bill does not address that area of consumer rights, but the House will have to return to it in the coming years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)]

I want to focus on certain aspects of the Bill that relate to the changing landscape of the types of products we purchase, the sales techniques we encounter, the impulse purchases consumers make, the consequences of those purchases and, last but not least, the consumer’s experience of the unknown data sharing that clearly happens.

A number of Government Members tried to entice us to welcome the Bill. Although I do not welcome it in its entirety, I welcome the spirit behind it. We welcome anything that brings consumer rights up to date, although I do not think that the Bill totally does that, or that protects the consumer, although the Bill does not do that in the way that we would like to protect them. Those on the Front Bench suggested, as I would hope, that they would engage with the devolved Administrations and encourage them to consider consumer rights and to embrace and work on some of the issues that are raised today and will be raised in Committee and during the later stages of the Bill.

It is difficult for consumers. It is difficult for them to know their rights and for some of them to understand those rights, or to know where to seek assistance if they believe that their rights have been breached. That crosses the generations, covering both the elderly and the young. Let me give an example, which is not in the Bill, that I would ask the Government to consider, caused by the changing way we purchase things. We go online to purchase nowadays, so protection is required on downloads as much as on the hardware and the physical products that we buy.

We must embrace the idea that we live in an age of online shopping and we purchase things that we can only download, as they have no hard physical existence. We still need those products to do exactly what we have purchased them to do, however. We are now living in the world of apps and if we download a patch to our phone or tablet, we should not just accept that it did not operate and move on to the next download.

I want to enlighten the House by sharing some of the experiences that my constituents tell me about when they come to my surgeries. They have had, or believe that they have had, their consumer rights infringed. One example involves unfair business behaviour and sales techniques, such as those used to sell products over the phone. Elderly constituents have come to me who have been caught out time and again by those selling over the phone. The most recent case involved insurance sales. It is not hard to pitch a sale when we have been through a difficult winter, with storms and so on. If someone says, “We can do your house insurance £50, £60 or £100 cheaper,” that would be enticing to an elderly couple, for example, with a low budget.

As we say, if something is too good to be true, it probably is, but those people only find that out when the dream bargain they think that they have acquired over the phone turns into a bit of a nightmare when they have to make a claim. I have heard complaints that such insurance sales companies are difficult to contact and difficult to get back to. After the difficult and stormy weather that we have had, they renege on their commitments for months on end. That means that we have elderly couples in extreme panic about the repairs needed to their roofs. They take on the insurance, but find that they end up phoning the other side of the country and are in a queue, meaning that it can take anything from 20 minutes to get through to someone to talk to. Even after that, the repair does not transpire for months.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that one of the great problems with some of those calls is how the company at the other end of the phone can make it look as though the consumer has to purchase the product, as though they are coming from some pseudo-position of knowledge? That is especially the case with the rightly much-unloved energy companies, some of which urge consumers to take out higher direct debits by making it look as though they have to do so because otherwise there will be serious problems. They even suggest that there will be money at the end and that it will be a nice way of saving. That is completely unethical.

[Mr McKenzie]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and she is absolutely right to say that there is a pressure from the other end of that telephone line to make the recipient think that the caller is selling the best possible product imaginable. Time and again, it catches people out.

It is not only a question of the elderly being caught out by sales over the phone and so on. Increasingly, a number of young people are coming in to my surgery. They are not the only people who purchase online, but they are increasingly purchasing certain products online and are bitterly disappointed by their quality. I am speaking about those who might have downloaded things, especially music, from the internet in the months leading up to Christmas, only to find that the music is not quite what it said it was and is not quite of the quality they would have expected from the group or individual they downloaded. For them, it is a case of saying, “That is not what I wanted: the product does not do what I thought it would when it was sold to me.” In some instances, it is not entirely the person they expected when they downloaded their purchase. Other people are filling up tracks just to make up the album.

The problem does not often come to light, because when people purchase something for £2.99 or £3.99 they think that it is not really worth their while to go back and complain. However, when we multiply the problem by the number of young people who make downloads and share that experience, it adds up to quite a bit of money. The Bill should look at the download and software side as much the hard physical side of the problem.

We live in an era in which we share a lot of data—perhaps we do not realise how much data companies have on us, including about our buying habits and other trends. I dare say that if we went into certain supermarkets, they could tell us what we purchased every week, what we changed every week and, more to the point, what we were probably enticed to buy when there were “Buy one, get one free” or “Three for the price of two” offers. It is that sharing of data that leads to another consumer experience: nuisance or persistent calls in which people are told, “We know what you buy, we know what you like, and we know what you might buy.” We live in a different world in which we are told that we should not wait and that we have to buy something now—“Get it now; don’t wait”—which is in stark contrast to the experience of a previous generation, who thought that if they could not afford something, they should not buy it. There are pressures to impulse buy as a result of the sharing of that sort of information. For some people, that leads inevitably to debt. An increasing number of people are getting into debt as the result of such purchases.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Is it not the case that when certain groups of people take those calls they take a backward step? They think that they are talking to the agent or the company, but in fact they are talking to a sub-company. They are left with a belief that they have to do something. It is not a question of whether they should do it—they have to do it.

[Mr McKenzie]

We should never forget that those sub-companies have targets, and they will do anything to meet them. For example, a young constituent came to see me. He had purchased a mobile phone contract, and wished to give up the phone after the term of his contract had ended. He found that, yes, it was easy to give up the phone, but he noticed on his bank statement that every month a deduction of £5 continued to be made by the company. He wondered what on earth it was about. He had given up the phone, only to find in the small print that he had been sold phone insurance. Because of its targets, the company continued to take insurance money, even though he did not have the phone.

That leads me to the problem of debt and how we help people to get out of debt. I am delighted that in my area we have begun a campaign to highlight the problem called Debtbusters, which has been rolled out across Scotland both to help people who have got into debt as a result of those purchases and to tackle payday lending. One way out is to offer advice on credit unions. The focus on credit unions tends to be the credit side, but we need to change that and focus on savings. It is unbelievable that, after eight weeks, someone can take out three times what they have saved and that leads to increased debt.

In conclusion, Labour believes that this Bill does not do enough to clarify the way in which customers are empowered in both local and national structures to ensure that they know who to turn to for help when things go wrong.