Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord does not wish to push this issue to a vote. I see the force of his arguments, but I disagree with them. The financial planning afforded by three years is sensible but, when we are dealing with consumer matters, long-term issues can easily be incorporated in an annual forecast of activities. Therefore, I do not think that only if you have a three-year plan will you be able to look beyond the horizon. Let us take two of the areas for which the National Consumer Council will be responsible under the Bill: energy and postal services. It would have been most unhelpful if, over the past two and half years, a consumer council for energy had not had to indicate what it wanted to do for the 12 months ahead, given that we had energy prices of such volatility and given the difficulties that confronted the regulator, the consumer and, indeed, Parliament. Where you have rapid change, as we have had of late in the energy markets, it would be foolhardy not to do that. People would ask, ““Why should the consumer council be looking into this? After all, it wasn’t in the three-year plan””. This is not an area of disagreement. We assume that, when the Bill is enacted, one of the major responsibilities of the National Consumer Council will be the protection of the postal consumer at a time when the market is opening. We know from the 1990s, when gas and electricity markets were liberalised, that problems arose that we had not anticipated. If, in those days, the old consumer councils had said, ““We’d like to look at that, but we’ve committed resource to other worthy causes””, there would have been a lack of flexibility. This is about the actions of the council and its freedom to operate. I think that, as the Bill stands, there is plenty of scope for longer-term planning within the documents and that the amendment would unduly tie the council’s hands. One thing that has not been taken account of and which we have to recognise is that, after the Bill is enacted, the National Consumer Council will, I imagine, be of far more interest to whatever committee is responsible for it in the House of Commons. As someone who chaired the Trade and Industry Committee for a number of years, I have to say that we perhaps did not pay as much attention to the National Consumer Council as we might have done, although we paid plenty of attention to Energywatch and Postwatch. It would be of great assistance to our colleagues elsewhere—where a Select Committee looks at this area of operation, affording a degree of parliamentary accountability—to be able to meet the council annually to discuss the work programme. That would allow the council to accommodate the views of the other House. I think that, although the amendment is well intentioned, it is fundamentally flawed, and therefore I hope that the noble Lord will not push it to a vote. I am in favour of three-year financing but I am not necessarily in favour of over-prescriptive three-year plans, which could well be inflexible.