Consumer Rights Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to add my congratulations to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, on bringing forward this amendment, following the advice that he had. It has been made very much, if I may say so, towards the last minute, but it is clearly a very necessary amendment because the responsibilities of the Competition Appeal Tribunal will be greatly widened by the Bill. If the House will forgive me, I will say a few words about Schedule 8, which does the widening. These are not the sort of words that will become entirely suitable when we consider whether the Bill do now pass—I had a grandfather who said “powder before jam”, and those who are as old as me will remember that it was Gregory-powder.

Schedule 8 makes a complex and major change to the law. It greatly widens the responsibilities of the Competition Appeal Tribunal. Similar jurisdictions have done the same sort of thing with opt-out arrangements for redress, and similar jurisdictions have had problems. I think that we have not thought this through nearly carefully enough. We live in a society where we aim to minimise disputes and maximise social cohesion. We do not want to incur additional costs when we know we have not got any more money.

What happened to scrutiny in your Lordships’ House? It may have something to do with this being a long Bill and this important part of it being put in a schedule very near the end. It may have something to do with it amending two other Bills. It might be something to do with trying to minimise the significance of the change. However, I have to say that Her Majesty’s Opposition did not really join the debate at all. Maybe they think it is a good Labour measure; it would be unsurprising if they did so. Maybe they were in thrall to Which?. The Cross Benches—apart from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope—did not play any part in the Bill and nor did my legally qualified friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches. I wonder why not, in circumstances of such a major change.

To conclude, Her Majesty’s Government have changed their position during the progress of the Bill. A lot of safeguards were promised after the House of Commons Committee reported on the Bill, but those have mostly disappeared. The House of Commons suggested that the Secretary of State should be subject to affirmative resolution when it came to the rules of the tribunal, to which we have already had reference; now the Secretary of State—I wonder who that will be—will be subject to a negative instrument only. All this has gone on while the public, as far as I am concerned as I played some part in Schedule 8, expressed no interest in this change—no interest at all that I have seen. They probably see it just as a Westminster village lobby measure. This is at a time when the two great parties of our nation are in decline; the third one I leave noble Lords to judge for themselves. At this stage in our history it is sometimes better to defer something, however good an idea it seems to both Front Benches. When both Front Benches agree one has to have doubts. To me, this is an excellent example of what not to do and how not to do it.