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Confident Consumers

I, too, welcome the debate as a chance to take forward the issue of consumers and the important role that empowering consumers can play in helping not only the individual but the economy, business and the general well-being of society. Creating confident consumers clearly not only needs informed consumers and fair competition, but for consumers to have the tools to make use of the information—the numeracy and literacy skills and the understanding of risk—because what goes wrong with many products and what causes many problems for consumers is that the person who is doing the selling can take advantage of their misunderstanding of the risk profile of what is being sold. A good consumer regime will benefit business and allow good businesses to thrive. The Minister touched on the structure of the Department of Trade and Industry, and we still believe that a separate Department of consumer affairs would put the voice of the consumer very much at the heart of Government and separate out the Department’s responsibilities for advocating the needs of business and consumers. In reply to my intervention, the Minister said that he would write further on the subject of the consumer and trading standards agency, but if the agency is to be effective it must be effectively resourced, and it must be brought together in a way that ensures that the sum of the parts is greater than that of the individual organisations that make it up. As the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk) has made clear, the Competition Commission’s welcome reinvestigation of supermarkets will help consumers by ensuring that there is a fair and level playing field for local shops. I reinforce the message that if the local shop is valued, it will be used. The shop will be there only if consumers are there to make use of it. Competition is one way in which consumers can benefit. The liberalisation of the car market and the opening up to competition of the sale of cars has improved the rights of consumers. They have benefited from price reductions and a more open market. Making sure that there is effective and open competition can often be the way to benefit consumers. Consumers can also ensure the delivery of other concerns. A consumer’s decision is the sum of all sorts of different interests that they have when they go out to buy a product, such as the price and the benefit of the product to them. Consumers also quite often have a wider interest. The fair trade movement has shown that those who are concerned about the conditions of suppliers in less developed countries can influence behaviour through their consumption. However, they need to be informed. The Minister should reconsider the Government’s decision to abandon the operating and financial review requirements of company law that would have forced companies to make sure that consumers had information on how they traded and operated. That would have meant that the market was more informed. As he recognises, informed consumers are able to make those decisions. If consumers do not have all the facts to enable them to assert their views, they will miss out. I welcome the Consumer Direct approach, which means that the informed consumer knows where to go to access information to take up their case and to make their case more strongly. Clearly, that organisation is guiding many consumers to the right place to assert their rights. Many consumers are able to assert their own rights, but I am concerned about the ““consumer voice”” role. In certain specialist areas—particularly energy and the postal services—where complex nationalised monopolies have been regulated and privatised and complex markets are involved, we need to be careful about the loss of individual advocacy. The Government may want to reconsider to ensure that less informed consumers and vulnerable consumers, who cannot assert their own rights, do not lose out; I shall come back to the energy sector in that context. If consumers have to rely on an ombudsman scheme, they have to access that scheme. The great benefit of what Energywatch and Postwatch have done in the past is that they have taken up individual problems on behalf of consumers. We need to look at the effectiveness of delivery in a wide area of consumer concerns. The telephone preference service assists people who face unwanted calls. People register with that service. However, what is being done to deliver what those people want? People still get the calls, and then they make a complaint. Some of the top companies have 1,800 complaints against them, but still have not faced a fine for breaking the rules of the telephone preference service. Clearly, consumers are trying to make use of a service to assert their rights, but the Information Commissioner needs more effective powers and resources to deliver what the consumer wants from the telephone preference service.