Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Borrie has hinted, I declare a recent interest as a former chair of Consumer Focus. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, is one of my predecessors, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, who is here as well. This might seem to be a slightly esoteric debate, but it is not. Consumer Focus, the National Consumer Council and the other bodies that preceded Consumer Focus have done decades of work on behalf of consumers. They have influenced Governments, regulators, business behaviour and behaviour in the public sector. It is important that that role is preserved along with that level of expertise. My noble friend Lady Hayter’s amendments seem to go with the grain of where the latest indication of government policy suggests that the department and the Government want to be. I say that with some doubt in my voice because, as my noble friend Lord Borrie has indicated, the Government’s exact strategy in this area has to a great extent been obscure, and I fear that the Minister’s department has been buffeted by powers around Whitehall that might be greater than she and her colleagues are able to exert. Originally her department came out with a sensible discussion on all the statutorily based consumer bodies and their relationships with regulators and industries, and decided to have a landscape review. Its original intention was to bring some of those bodies together and rationalise the landscape because there were too many such bodies with conflicting, or at least overlapping, duties, and what was being achieved in one sector was not being reflected effectively in another. I applauded that approach. It is also clearly the Government’s view that the main part of Consumer Focus’s activity should be carried out not by a quango but in the third sector. Some on these Benches would probably raise an eyebrow at that; I know that my noble friend Lord Borrie did not agree with me. In principle, though, I have no objection to the consumer interest being protected by a powerful and properly resourced third-sector body, its role recognised in statute. In some ways, that makes an enormous amount of sense. We are not at that point, however; we are at the point where the research, policy, advice and educational functions of Consumer Focus are in limbo. We know that the Government’s intention is to transfer them to Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland. However, the Government have not indicated which functions or powers will be transferred. Some of those powers are very effective, as my noble friend Lady Hayter has said—for example, the statutory power to require information. To date, the Government have not said explicitly that they are going to transfer all those powers to Citizens Advice. Likewise, Citizens Advice has not said that it wishes to accept or exert those powers. As noble Lords will know, the central function of Citizens Advice is also dependent on significant resources from the Minister’s department, and those resources have been cut. Citizens Advice has to assess whether it can effectively carry out those extra functions, and we do not yet have an answer to that. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said that government Amendment 94 makes it explicit that functions transferred to a charity—I believe I am right in saying that, apart from British Waterways where the charity does not yet exist, this is the major area where the Government’s intention is to transfer currently statutory functions exerted by a non-departmental public body to a charity—are subject to the agreement of the charity. In a sense that is obvious and right but it raises a question: where the Government intend to transfer these important functions on behalf of all consumers in all sectors to a charity, if the charity refused or felt unable to take on those activities, what would then happen to those activities? I am going quite a long way with the Government on this. It is not necessarily where I or the Consumer Focus board started from, but we accept some general strategy from the Government to bring some of these things together and place them in the third sector. There will be transfers. There will be a transfer of our functions to Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland, although they will be subject to the uncertainties that I have mentioned. Those uncertainties are made more difficult by the fact that the department originally indicated that a draft of the consultation document on this change would be before the public by this stage but we have yet to see such a draft. That uncertainty is only part of it, though. There will also have to be powers of transfer to the Consumer Council for Northern Ireland for our postal functions. In Scotland and Wales, as the Minister may be aware, parties in the devolved Administrations are saying that they want to retain something like Consumer Focus Scotland and Consumer Focus Wales. There will therefore be multiple transfers. The Government have always said that they do not intend to lose these functions. It is therefore wrong that Consumer Focus should be in Schedule 1. Logically, according to the Government’s own presentation of their strategy, it should be in Schedule 5. I have not heard Ministers or anyone in this House suggesting that any of the powers, functions or duties of Consumer Focus should be lost entirely. Therefore, they should be transferred. If the Government attempt to transfer to an organisation that cannot accept that transfer, and if they have exerted the powers under Schedule 1, the powers, duties, activities, expertise and potential to do effective work on behalf of consumers are lost until we return to a new piece of primary legislation which inevitably some Government at some point will have to introduce. These two amendments—the switch from the abolition of Consumer Focus to a transfer of its functions—are in line with what we have been told is the Government’s position and what we are told are the powers that the Government will need. It is counterproductive to the Government’s own objective to retain it where it is.