Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Lord Black of Brentwood Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 127 in this group. I do not hold, in any particular way, to my choice of wording, but I am fairly sure the Government’s choice of wording is not right. We all receive a huge quantity of emails; we do not want multiplicity—we want effectiveness—and to demand that these emails come separately is a mistake. I hope the Government will see this as an opportunity to rationalise and reduce the size of my inbox and everybody else’s inbox. If we allow more than one thing to be in the message, then the prominent message must be the statutory one. To have it in the subject line and in the first sentence, so that it comes up in the summary when you look at what the email is about, would be a better way of putting it than my amendment, but I am sure the Government can improve on that.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my earlier declarations of interest.

I raised a significant number of issues relating to subscription contracts in Committee. I am very grateful to both my noble friends on the Front Bench for listening to those arguments, and for bringing forward amendments to deal with them, and I strongly support them. They help fulfil the Government’s aims without placing unacceptable burdens on business.

There is only one remaining issue that we dealt with in Committee, and that is why I am supporting the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. His amendment would remove the prescriptive wording that is currently in the Bill and allow for traders to provide notices

“in a clear and prominent manner:”

His wording simply recognises that the prescribed renewal information is at the heart of the notice and must not be skewed out of view, while allowing for other beneficial information to be included, if desired. I am sure all noble Lords will be very happy that it ensures notices do not become a GDPR-style irritant, but something which is actually helpful to consumers. It would certainly be counterproductive if consumers experienced information fatigue and stopped opening communications from traders or simply opted out of them all together.

Equally, it will alleviate the burdens on traders, who may feel obliged to send emails around the time of renewal notices, to provide information on alternative deals, packages and so on, which could otherwise be dealt with in one communication. As my noble friend said, there may be other ways of dealing with it, or other wording, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about this amendment, which I support.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I am going to be extremely brief as I think we are all anxious to move towards seeing whether the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, will move his previous amendment to a vote.

There is a common factor here; all these amendments were designed to flush out the Minister to give more assurance and information, and in large part that has been successful. There are still some outliers in terms of reminder notices; the Minister is well aware that there are some players, like Adobe, who will find, when they work it out, that they are going to have to give five notices for an annual contract. I do not know whether the Minister has looked at that and has answers to it.