Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
Main Page: Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all speakers for contributing to the debate this afternoon. It has been a very well informed one and one that has helped to pick out and distil for us some of the main issues which we face as we go forward with the Consumer Rights Bill. It is very appropriate that we should have with us the first Consumer Affairs Minister, whose comments we listened to with interest, particularly as he was able to point us back to Magna Carta and the ideas in that about the need for fair trading, on fair coinage and with fair measurement, which are, of course, still very relevant and important issues for us today.
My noble friend Lady Hayter explained, when she introduced the Bill, our general approach to and support for the Bill, limited mainly to its consolidation measures, but nevertheless sincere in that. Although we will be scrutinising with some vigour some of the points in the Bill, we do not want to give the impression in any sense to the Government that we are not in support of what is being said here, because it is a good thing. On the other hand, my noble friend Lady King made a very important point, which is that there are a number of missed opportunities here, since there will probably not be another Bill of this nature for some time. It can be regarded as a once-in-a-Parliament opportunity missed.
My responsibilities are limited to supporting my noble friend Lady Hayter across the Bill, and in particular to picking up on the digital points. I shall not go into detail on them, but the general point we will be making is that the Government are wrong to have ignored the advice of the Select Committee on this matter, which was, in scrutinising the Bill in its earlier stages, that the right approach to be taken for the sales of digital content—some of the largest in the known world and increasing significantly, as many noble Lords picked up on—is that it should be the same as for physical goods. The Government have not chosen that route and we want to check very hard with them why that is the case and how we might improve the Bill in order to get closer to that. There should be parity between rights in the physical exchange of goods and the e-commerce worlds.
A number of noble Lords mentioned our general concern that the Bill is a missed opportunity in that it does not seek to create more trust in the virtual world, where people are increasingly acquiring goods and services, as the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said, from unknown parts of the world. We do not quite know sometimes where they are coming from, but more importantly, and more relevant to the tenor of the Bill, we need to think harder about what information should be available to all consumers, particularly those in the digital world, at the point of sale. That seems to be a key point at which we must bring together the information required for people to understand what it is they are purchasing, to understand their rights at the time of purchase and what their redress options are. Unless we do that, we are missing a very important trick here.
As has been picked up, the Bill takes a bold step towards the provision of services in relation to consumer rights. It would be good if the Minister could be very clear on this when he comes to respond. This is a really interesting and important point. If, as seems to be the case, the Government are set on going to a stage whereby services provided for a value, including those from public authorities, are subject to the same concerns within the Bill, it is important that we get the tests under which these will be looked at right.
The noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, and my noble friend Lady Drake made good points about the need to think harder about the question of a satisfactory quality test. This was discussed in another place and we think that the test that should be applied is that the goods and services supplied should be “of satisfactory quality”. The Government however, have adopted a different standard, that they must be performed,
“with reasonable skill and care”.
As has already been said this evening, and I think that it is important, that seems to be more to do with how the service has been performed, rather than whether or not the outcomes have been satisfactory. This is something we must return to.
Several noble Lords touched on the question of consumer advice and the need for business education, in the sense of making sure that businesses understood their responsibilities and their need to ensure that they have fulfilled all requirements in relation to consumers who purchase their goods. There is a case for the Bill to be more specific about consumer and business education. We have touched on point-of-sale information, for instance. I hope that the Minister will spend some time explaining what the implementation group is supposed to be doing in this area. A lot of the responsibilities that might have been in the Bill appear to have been offered to that group. What format is it taking? Is it working to a particular timetable and what outcomes should we expect to receive from it? To have further consideration of the Bill in Committee, it would be helpful if we had better information and an understanding of that work.
My noble friend Lord Whitty alluded to the changes that have been made and are ongoing in the Government’s consumer landscape. I think reviews are still needed in some areas but most of this seems to have emerged from review and is now in the implementation phase. One important thing is that many responsibilities which used to lie with the Government are now to be undertaken by independent charities such as Citizens Advice and the Trading Standards Institute, a body whose legal form I am still not quite sure about. However, it seems to have increasing powers and money to do work across the trading standards area. Some of those statutory responsibilities that used to lie with the Government are now with those bodies, to educate consumers and businesses. We will need to spend some time on this as we go through Committee because it is important to understand not only what power but what responsibilities are there, and how they relate to the Government’s responsibilities. At the moment, this is not clear.
When my noble friend Lady Hayter was giving her speech, she ran through a list of specific omissions which she felt could have improved and enhanced the Bill. A number of noble Lords came back to some of those omissions. I will touch on one or two points which still need to be brought through on that. On the question of how consumer rights will be applied in the public sector, if it is true that these rights are now available to those public service users who have acquired services at a reasonable price, how are these rights to be applied? How, for instance, will individual consumers be able to take up responsibilities for challenging university tuition fees that may not represent value for money, for personal health budgets, for the BBC licence fee, for controlled parking zones, for bus fares or for the provision of water and sanitation services? Is this now the world we are in? Can the noble Viscount run through some of that to make sure that we understand, as my noble friend Lady King was saying, exactly what is available as the subject of consumer redress on these matters?
The individual issues may well have been alluded to in debate and discussion but, when the Minister responds, perhaps he could also explain whether he is hoping for a single response from the government departments which are now responsible for responding to consumer interests in these matters or whether there will be variable responses and, if so, how that will be exercised across the piece.
My noble friend Lady Crawley raised the need for data to be more available across the consumer landscape. The issues here are largely to do with the information collected by those who, under the Bill, are responsible for carrying out investigations, such as trading standards officers. It is also important to recognise that much information lies with ombudsmen and with the courts, which have been responsible for implementing many of the measures for which protection is provided. How are we doing on access to data? We went through quite a lot of this in the exchanges over Midata, which was meant to open up this area. We have not seen much of that recently and I think that the Minister was responsible for it at one point, so perhaps he could enlighten us further. Clearly, the anticipation was that this sense in which data would be available to people so that they could exercise their own choices through, say, price comparison sites would be important to better consumer information. I think we broadly support that but we have not had much detail on it. It would be useful to have more information, as well as on the wider question of whether the data held in areas such as trading standards can be circulated and made available to consumers more widely.
My noble friend Lord Wills picked up on the question of nuisance calls and marketing problems which are still very prevalent across the country. We understand that the Information Commissioner, having set up an online reporting tool in March 2012, has had more than 240,000 complaints about unsolicited calls and texts, and Ofcom has also carried out research into this. This is obviously a major problem. It is a pest to the modern world, where the phone calls you receive are never the ones you expect. They are always the ones which offer you things that you could not possibly want or wish for and you have no reason to understand why these people were ringing you in the first place. My response to that is to leave the phone open so that they at least rack up the cost of the call. However, that means that I cannot ring my friends at the same time, so it is a bit irritating. We need to get hold of this issue. It is a modern-day problem which affects vulnerable people in particular, who have difficulties in dealing with it. I hope we will deal with it in the Bill.
Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, raised a question about how we will operate proper scrutiny measures if the trading standards officers are not able to go into premises without giving 48 hours’ notice. The position is changing and several noble Lords have asked the Minister to respond on this. It is obviously crucial to understanding how a redress will happen.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, also mentioned, as did a number of other noble Lords, letting fees and agencies. This is an area on which we touched in previous Bills but this Bill seems an appropriate area in which to get more action on that.
I was involved in the Olympics Bill and I am therefore aware of the measures that were taken to make sure that ticket touting was eliminated from the process. Indeed, I think it was the Minister who took the Bill through the House on his first run as a Minister here. He will therefore be aware, as I was, about the doubts and reservations that we shared around the House on how this would happen. We resolved it on the day by a slick and effective system brought in by the Olympic authorities, which meant that ticket touting, effectively, did not exist across the whole range of the Games in 2012.
However, on a number of occasions we have had opportunities to think again about this. The Government have not taken up those opportunities despite the fact that police operations in this area seem to suggest that there are criminal actions at work, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, mentioned, and that significant amounts of money—either through direct corruption or money-laundering—are passing through a system which now needs the attention of the Government. I hope that we can spend some time on this matter in Committee and get a resolution to it because it has reached a point where it needs to be looked at.
Several noble Lords referred to the need for the Bill to think more closely about the rights of children in relation to consumer activity. Payday lending is particularly worth looking at. There is also the wider question raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about whether or not we should use the opportunity of the Bill to consider gambling and the opportunities that were not taken up in the gambling Bill to deal with IP blocking and financial transaction blocking. Age verification in relation to child protection could also fit within the Bill. Perhaps the Minister will respond on this point when he comes to it.
Those are a number of points which we will go into in some detail in Committee, where I hope we will have a chance to firmly test the Government’s interests in these matters. If we can make progress together around the House, so much the better for the Bill.
As my noble friend Lady Hayter said, we welcome the Bill in principle. We think it is a contribution towards updating UK consumer law, which it is necessary to do. However, there are real concerns about the underpinning of the Bill. The success of the Bill will be heavily dependent on how consumer rights are upheld through public enforcement at a time when, as we have heard, trading standards departments up and down the country are being significantly cut back and, at the same time, being asked to take on new responsibilities.
As we have heard, a new private redress system will be coming through in relation to mechanisms such as ADR. It is not clear why the Bill does not deal with that—except that it is probably not in the right timeframe—but it is obviously an issue. There is a new link to the Competition and Markets Authority, which has only just established itself. It is not clear yet—although it may be by the time we get to Committee—how and in what way it will work with consumer interests at its heart. We also have to think harder about how the courts will be able to support private and group complaints. We think that one of the important themes that we need to address in Committee is the powers of redress and enforcement that need to be improved if the Bill is to make the sort of difference that it ought to.
As we have heard, the framework of consumer rights is complicated enough, so much so that it is a pity that one of the speakers today felt that she was unable to play a part in the later stages of the Bill; we regret that. The landscape needs to be clearly identified. We know that there is a Competition and Markets Authority and that the transfer of powers and responsibility to Citizens Advice is happening. We know that work is going on somewhere in the Government between now and July 2015 when they are required to implement the ADR directive. As well as the Bill, we have an update coming through regarding the EU consumer rights directive, which has been mentioned, and a number of welcome pro-consumer measures that have come through from the Law Commission recommendations on misleading and aggressive practices, so it is a very complicated area to keep in frame. It might be necessary to spend a bit of time in Committee on being clear about which parts the Bill addresses and which parts it cannot and will not, as well as understanding where the issues that some of us have raised today are being picked up and taken forward.
At the heart of all this work, we have to think harder, as a number of noble Lords have done, about the consumers who are currently overpaying for many basic goods and services and being short-changed by service providers, resulting in excessive costs, because they are not aware of their rights or able to exercise them effectively. We believe that healthy, fair and competitive markets are vital to building an economy that works for both consumers and businesses. In a modern, progressive society, consumer powers are the missing piece of the jigsaw for preventing problems from besetting the public and for opening up creativity and innovation in goods and services. We believe that savvy consumers make better customers for businesses, and that better informed citizens get better outcomes in dealing with the public and private sectors, both for themselves and for each other.
We need a three-pronged approach, which should underlie the discussions. First, there has to be better access to information, to ensure that consumers are able to make decisions themselves that are as accurate and efficient as possible. Secondly, there has to be advice or advocacy—that is, proper support that helps to guide consumers and businesses through what can be a complex and changing landscape of rights and responsibilities must be available and easy to access. Thirdly, there must be effective and speedy redress, which needs to be clear and as close to the consumer/trader interaction as possible. The Bill will not take us all the way down those three prongs, but nevertheless we look forward to scrutinising it in Committee.