Digital Economy Bill

Lord Tope Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 75 and 76, which deal with the sale of counterfeit electrical goods on the internet. There is growing concern about this practice, which has increased massively over the past 20 years—by 10,000%—and is continuing to increase at around 15% a year. The industry of counterfeit goods is worth something like £1.3 billion, according to the Electrical Safety Council, and 64% of these goods are sold on the internet. People believe that they are buying reputable brands, as they are dealing with an online retailer that is well known and they assume that the goods are genuine.

The fact that there are so many accidents and so many problems with these goods is another reason that we are bringing these amendments today, as we see this Bill as an opportunity to do something about this practice. The goods are often dangerous. The Electrical Safety Council calculates that something like 7,000 domestic fires are caused by faulty goods, and many of these are counterfeit goods. The practice of selling these goods undermines genuine brands and causes great difficulty within the industry. Faulty goods can also cause great harm directly to individual people.

These amendments seek to give some responsibility to online retailers to report to trading standards and the police goods that they know to be counterfeit. The second amendment requires the Government to provide a review and report on the extent of this practice as well as its impact on the economy. I beg to move.

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, my name is also to this amendment, so I support my noble friend Lady Janke. I declare that I am a patron of Electrical Safety First.

My noble friend has stated the problem very well. The ask from this amendment is very modest: we are asking the Government to establish a review. It may not be appropriate for that to be in the Bill, but it gives us an opportunity at this stage for the Government to come back and tell us what they are going to do about counterfeit goods, which are clearly a fast-growing problem.

Our particular concern is with electrical goods, although I could probably add gas goods as well. Counterfeiting clearly is a problem, and I do not minimise it, but a counterfeit handbag is unlikely to kill you; counterfeit electrical goods most certainly can, and do, kill people. I happened to spend my Sunday reading the trading standards journal TS Review, as I imagine many of your Lordships would have been doing. I read that,

“More than 99 per cent…fake Apple chargers failed a basic safety test. Twelve were so poorly designed and constructed that they posed a risk of lethal electrocution to the user”.


On the same page, it is reported that the London Fire Brigade has stated that,

“Across London, 2,072 fires involving white goods have been recorded since January 2011, with more than £118m estimated to have been lost from London’s economy as a result”.


This clearly is a problem, not only to those who produce the products legitimately. Indeed, I noticed that eBay, of all places, is setting up an authentication scheme so that the proper producers can have their goods authenticated by experts as being not counterfeit. This indicates a huge problem.

The purpose of these amendments is to seek a commitment from the Government that they will establish reviews into goods sold and, in particular, goods sold on the internet. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us, first, that the Government recognise this increasing problem and, secondly, if they do, what they are going to do about it.