My Lords, my noble friend has expressed the position far more precisely than me. I underline her comments. I will not pursue the point today but I ask the department to reflect on it and on how it will justify to the public that there should be a lower level of potential redress in the energy sector than there is in the financial services sector. I just ask that question.
In relation to collective redress, I believe that the Government, the Minister for Consumer Affairs and the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, who is replying for her department, have moved some way to recognise the need for consumer redress to be dealt with on a collective basis on occasion. It is particularly important that that is provided for in the regulated sectors. The amendment that I am proposing would allow the Minister to come forward with a whole range of potential forms of collective redress. Most of those would be less expensive than individuals taking cases themselves and would take less time. They could, indeed, be pursued by intermediaries, but the aggregate cost to consumers and the industry would be significantly less than if every single consumer, or even 10% of consumers, started to take individual cases through the courts, with each one taking time to reach a conclusion. I cannot see that collective redress is ever going to be more time-consuming and costly than having a range of thousands of individual redress cases, whether they are taken through the ombudsman, the economic regulator or the courts.
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I hope that the Government will consider further the issue of collective redress. Perhaps they will not do so until the draft Bill in the Commons, to which I referred, has come to fruition. At that point at least, I hope that there will be reconsideration of the benefits of collective redress. Probably this week I should not be talking about opt in and opt out, but the opt-out situation is even clearer. It would be even cheaper than what is provided for in the draft of the consumer rights Bill. Whatever the form of collective redress, it is very important that this sector looks at the option and that, in the light of general progress on consumer rights, we come back to this at a later stage. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.