Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

I declare my interest again. The amendments go to the heart of the Bill. I am not objecting to discussing them here, but were they to be accepted, much of the institutional change introduced by the Bill would then fall. Therefore, the case for integrating Energywatch, Postwatch and possibly the Consumer Council for Water into one organisation needs to be made. I am sure the Minister will make it. My take on this is that when those industries were privatised, it was clearly necessary to establish a regulator for them to protect the interests of the consumer. Those regulators will continue to exist and continue to exert their powers. At the same time, it was felt necessary to establish either within those regulators or separately, or subsequently separately, a consumer organisation. As time has gone on, it has become clear that the consumer anxieties, apart from those that reflect a not completely free market, are very similar to consumer anxieties and detriment elsewhere. The treatment by a utility company of its consumers in misleading billing, misleading advertising, overcharging, failure to describe a service, or failure to maintain a service is not actually that dissimilar to the failures of a bank, a builder or, with due respect to another Bill before the House, a lawyer. Therefore, there are generic issues relating to consumer detriment, consumer anxiety, and the way in which consumer views are taken into account when we are furthering legislation and regulation of those industries. It is therefore quite important that we have a single organisation that is able to deal with that. At the other end of the scale, there are consumer queries about every sort of supply of service or product, which probably, as my noble friend Lord O’Neill has said, would be better served by having a single point of call rather than a whole range of different numbers to contact about different services. Because the National Consumer Council and the new National Consumer Council in this legislation have a particular responsibility for vulnerable consumers, it is important that we make it as easy as possible for the more vulnerable consumers to make contact about basic information. That will be done by an extension—as I understand the DTI’s proposals—of Consumer Direct. The new National Consumer Council will bring together all those generic concerns of consumers in one advocacy body, which will cover the water front. I agree with my noble friend Lord O’Neill that it would be better if it covered the whole water front and not 80 per cent, but we have 80 per cent, with water possibly coming in at a later stage. It is important that that organisation has a full view of all the concerns of consumers and is able to transfer expertise from one area, which has perhaps been developed in relation to financial services, into an area such as utility provision, provision of energy or provision of postal services. At present, the advocacy or policy role of Energywatch and of Postwatch is relatively limited and very focused. Those areas that require continuing attention continue to be reflected in the Bill—for example, the number of post offices, which is a matter of acute concern at the moment, would become the issue of concern for the new National Consumer Council quite explicitly, and it would have at least as powerful a role in that respect as Postwatch currently has. It would bring to bear a wider range of consumer expertise to deal with that problem. For example, rural post offices are part of a broader problem of the decline of services, both private and public, in rural areas more generally. Put in that context, there may be a more creative solution than simply the issue of how many rural post offices maintain in existence. As far as the issue of designated consumers is concerned, however, it is important that the consumers of postal services and energy services do not lose any rights in this transfer, either into the complaints issue or into their representation in policy-making. Therefore the issue is not just priority consumers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, has just said, but the fact that they already have some statutory protection that needs to be carried into this, so that they do not lose out. Maybe ““designated”” is not a particularly helpful term, but it is important that they are clearly identified and that their rights under current legislation are transferred into the new organisation.