Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

After what I hope was a pleasant Christmas break for everyone and with wishes for a happy new year, including to the Minister and his team, we return to the question of what is the point of this Bill. It aims to abolish Energywatch, Postwatch and the National Consumer Council, and to create a new National Consumer Council which will subsume the duties of those bodies. In opposing the Motion that this clause shall stand part, we question the wisdom of abolishing Energywatch and ask the Government to make their case for doing so. In asking that, I want to make a number of points, particularly given that the energy market is going through a volatile phase at the moment. Any consumer can tell you that they feel under considerable pressure to switch energy suppliers, which is a recognised way of saving money on fuel bills. However, very clever people out there who are not directly employed by the energy companies but hired at second-hand in what I might describe as a pyramid-selling scheme through firms in the pay of the energy companies, go around organising the switch of customers from one account to another. This rather febrile atmosphere has lead to a situation where in our view consumers need as much protection from a body like Energywatch as they can get. My central question to the Government is this: is the new body, one that may dilute the expertise of Energywatch and which will have split functions in terms of complaints and advocacy, really going to be a better solution as regards consumers? I can understand that the DTI wants to streamline things and save money, and that is a perfectly admirable aim. However, if by doing so the Government save themselves a little money while the process costs consumers considerably more simply because they will not have such a good body representing their interests, I do not believe that that is to their benefit. We only have to look at the work of Energywatch on smart metering to realise that what it does can have considerable benefits for consumers. It would be a terrific step forward if the Government were to take Energywatch’s comments on smart metering firmly on board and progress the issue. Consumers would gain because they would be able to reduce their fuel bills by introducing better consumption patterns rather than just switching from one supplier to another. That contributes nothing in terms of tackling the issues around carbon emissions. Smart metering can provide a win-win situation in which consumers save money and the environment suffers from fewer carbon emissions. Energywatch has made a strong case for the Government to make a move on smart metering and, indeed, for Ofgem to take this on board. My fear is that this kind of work, which benefits consumers and the climate-change agenda, will not fall into the remit of the NCC in the same way as it falls into that of Energywatch. It empowers consumers to do what they cannot do at the moment: that is, to sell the surplus energy they create through micro-generation back into the grid. Indeed, suppliers of energy could save on costs because they would have reduced contact and would not need people going around reading meters. Finally, the biggest plus from the point of view of Energywatch is that the huge number of difficulties over billing would disappear because the smart meters would feed the information back directly to the energy companies. Many bills are estimated and incorrect bills cause great difficulties, but cases such as those to which we referred on the first day in Committee would disappear as a result of smart metering. If the Government continue down the path of abolishing Energywatch, which I believe they intend to do, perhaps a very good legacy of the work done by the staff of Energywatch to date would be for the Government to make a move to ensure that smart meters are brought in.