Consumer Protection

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I welcome the way in which the Minister has put this to the House. I would be interested in the responses to the questions raised by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss), the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson.

I have had two serious interests in consumer protection, which may or may not be partially affected by this regulation. The first was in residential leasehold, when Tchenguiz interests—although I am not terribly concerned about which they were—forced large numbers of lease- holders to change their call systems. There were rigged bids for replacing them, and when eventually the authorities began to take account of what was happening, the subsidiary Cirrus, which did nearly all the work, having won nearly all the bids, reported itself, saying that it was involved in a cartel. The others were minnows. The others got punished, and the Tchenguiz interests, through Peverel and Cirrus, got off scot-free.

I would like to know from the Minister, perhaps in writing after this debate, whether that is the kind of thing that could be picked up by these regulations, if reported by, for example, the campaigning charity Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, or whether there is some other way in which the Serious Fraud Office, trading standards and others could come in and protect these people. There are no current legal proceedings, so there is no particular problem, and the Minister may want to get her Department to consult other Departments about what they were doing when they were first alerted to these problems.

Secondly, I advise the Government to try to make sure that all those involved take account of the serious issues that are justified, but do not spend too much time chasing ones that are not. Many years ago, when I was Minister for roads, painting white lines down the middle of our national highways—quite a dangerous position to be in—our Consumers Association, Which?, followed up something from the Consumer Union in the United States, which wrongly took against a small four-wheel-drive car called the Suzuki Jimny or Samurai or 410; the suggestion was that it was the most dangerous vehicle on the roads, which should be banned. It was clearly not more dangerous than motor cycles. It turned out that it was not even the most dangerous in terms of stability. Nevertheless, for a year I had to fight off those who were arguing for a ban.

The point of telling this story to the Minister is that I hope the Government will take some account of science, that they will take some account of whether complaints are justified, and that where complaints are justified and consumers are at risk they will take action, but where they are not they will pass the matter back and say, “Try again some other time. We are interested in what works—is it necessary, is it right and will it work?”