I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and she is absolutely right to say that there is a pressure from the other end of that telephone line to make the recipient think that the caller is selling the best possible product imaginable. Time and again, it catches people out.
It is not only a question of the elderly being caught out by sales over the phone and so on. Increasingly, a number of young people are coming in to my surgery. They are not the only people who purchase online, but they are increasingly purchasing certain products online and are bitterly disappointed by their quality. I am speaking about those who might have downloaded things, especially music, from the internet in the months leading up to Christmas, only to find that the music is not quite what it said it was and is not quite of the quality they would have expected from the group or individual they downloaded. For them, it is a case of saying, “That is not what I wanted: the product does not do what I thought it would when it was sold to me.” In some instances, it is not entirely the person they expected when they downloaded their purchase. Other people are filling up tracks just to make up the album.
The problem does not often come to light, because when people purchase something for £2.99 or £3.99 they think that it is not really worth their while to go back and complain. However, when we multiply the problem by the number of young people who make downloads and share that experience, it adds up to quite a bit of money. The Bill should look at the download and software side as much the hard physical side of the problem.
We live in an era in which we share a lot of data—perhaps we do not realise how much data companies have on us, including about our buying habits and other trends. I dare say that if we went into certain supermarkets, they could tell us what we purchased every week, what we changed every week and, more to the point, what we were probably enticed to buy when there were “Buy one, get one free” or “Three for the price of two” offers. It is that sharing of data that leads to another consumer experience: nuisance or persistent calls in which people are told, “We know what you buy, we know what you like, and we know what you might buy.” We live in a different world in which we are told that we should not wait and that we have to buy something now—“Get it now; don’t wait”—which is in stark contrast to the experience of a previous generation, who thought that if they could not afford something, they should not buy it. There are pressures to impulse buy as a result of the sharing of that sort of information. For some people, that leads inevitably to debt. An increasing number of people are getting into debt as the result of such purchases.