Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am in complete agreement with the objectives of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in introducing this Bill. There are very good reasons why age restrictions are applied by law to the sale of various products, and I strongly support all efforts by trading standards, parents, local authorities, the police and the relevant industries to make sure that the law is properly understood, observed and enforced. Growth of online sales in all sectors means that we urgently need to update the regime of good practice and regulation in this respect. However, I should like to flag up one or two questions about whether the Bill as it stands is the best way of achieving those objectives. It is partly to do with timing and partly to do with the practicalities of good regulation. It may be that all this can be resolved in Committee, or perhaps a different mechanism altogether could be identified for achieving what we all want to see. Before setting out my concerns in more detail, I should like to give some examples of how the drinks industry has dealt with this issue, because I believe that there are some examples of best practice here that may be helpful when setting standards across the board. Alcohol is one of the best-known products to which a legal minimum purchase age applies. I declare an interest as a former chief executive of the Portman Group, which introduced the very first national proof of age card in 1990. I also currently advise two drinks producers on social responsibility issues. As I said, as far back as 1990, the leading drinks producers who supported the Portman Group decided that they needed to support the retailers who sold their products in avoiding illegal underage sales, and the proof of age card was launched. Over the years, it was developed to make it more secure and reliable—for example, by acquiring a virtually forge-proof hologram on the face of the card to help retailers to weed out the fake cards. Whenever we became aware of websites offering fake cards based on our design, we took legal action and, in all cases as far as I remember, the relevant internet service provider agreed to take down the offending website. However good proof of age cards are, they can only ever be as effective as the retailers make them by consistently demanding to see them, but we all know that there have been too many occasions when underage customers have managed to buy alcohol for themselves. This problem is arguably magnified when it comes to online sales. It is not that I think that the alcohol sector is anything like the most problematic when it comes to online sales to underage customers; most children intent on buying alcohol will want it immediately and will not go to the trouble of ordering it over the internet. Nevertheless, the industry has taken this issue very seriously. That is why the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, for example, has initiated a comprehensive system to deter underage sales for all distance-selling operations, which includes sales by phone and mail order as well as over the internet. Most alcohol retailers already have systems in place to ensure that their delivery companies sign over alcoholic drinks products only to adults over 18 at the point of delivery. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, this is not 100 per cent foolproof, although I wonder whether any checking system would be, given young people's ingenious agility with technology. Some alcohol retailers have a requirement to set up an account before ordering online, or they accept payment only by credit card. Many fine wine businesses conduct transactions only via bank transfers, a mechanism which I understand is not available to under-18s. In June last year, the WSTA announced a new deal with 192.com Business Services, the leading age and identity verification specialists, which will help all its member companies to check online customer age even more efficiently. In case your Lordships should think that this is just a small drop in the ocean and confined to the niche markets of fine wines, which are unlikely to attract underage custom, I should say that the WSTA has more than 300 members, including all the major high-street supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose and the Co-op, as well as the specialist chains such as Threshers and First Quench Retailing. Therefore, if we were looking only at online underage sales of alcohol, I might be tempted to say that we do not need legislation at all, because enlightened self-interest is already producing the level of self-regulation required to do the job, but I can see that standards of compliance vary considerably from sector to sector and that the culture of social responsibility also varies. However, I am worried that one of the Bill's apparent strengths—its flexibility—may also be one of its weaknesses. It creates a duty on retailers to take all reasonable steps to establish the age of the customer, but what those reasonable steps are may well vary from sector to sector, and the Secretary of State will issue advice and guidance. I should like to know whether that is intended to acknowledge and accommodate differences between sectors and products, and therefore allow flexible interpretation of the duty so long as the desired outcome is achieved. For example, online age verification software might be suitable and effective for some businesses but not for others. One of the principles of better regulation, which have long been accepted by the Government, is that regulation should be properly targeted, and I hope that undue burdens will not end up being imposed on some sectors which are already looking after themselves in order to draw others into line. I am also concerned about consistency and proportionality, two of the other better regulation principles. Again, I believe that this is all resolvable. It is about timing. The Policing and Crime Bill, which is currently awaiting its Report stage in another place before coming to your Lordships' House, provides for a mandatory code for alcohol retailers which itself includes, in draft, a clause proposing that it be a mandatory condition of all licences that online retailers utilise age verification software. The formal consultation on the code is expected to be published shortly. I do not know whether the Minister can say something about that; but in relation to the Bill, we would obviously need to make sure that we are not creating impractical and unnecessary duplication, or worse still, conflicting duties for retailers. The other timing issue that I want to mention, which might even contain the seeds for an alternative approach to this problem, is the current consultation on the review of the advertising codes, which ends on 19 June. I am very familiar with these codes and the Advertising Standards Authority which administers them, as I was a member of the ASA council until very recently. The rules currently do not cover e-commerce, but the advertising and media industries are actively looking at whether they could or should extend the remit of the ASA to cover advertising on a company website. If this were to happen, it might well be logical for the ASA to produce guidance on online purchase, which of course would cover all sectors and products, and not just the one on which I have focused in my examples. I have no idea how likely this is to unfold, but it is a live discussion which should be taken into account when considering the progress of this Bill. If the remit of the advertising code did extend in the way that I have tentatively described, the ASA rather than the Secretary of State might well be the most sensible source of the advice and guidance referred to in Clause 1(3), and it would be a natural extension to the system of co-regulation that is working so well in the advertising field. This idea is perhaps worth exploring further to see whether it will do the trick or whether it would still leave gaps that would be better filled by legislation. I hope that my comments and suggestions will be taken as constructively as they are intended, and I look forward to hearing the comments both of the Minister and of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey.