My Lords, I very much agree with pretty well everything that has just been said by my noble friend Lady Crawley. She is the current president of the Trading Standards Institute, which has done a great deal of good over many years, not only in the individual local authorities which it represents but in getting together on a number of matters. That has reached a kind of culmination in the creation of the National Trading Standards Board, whereby it can get together and discuss matters, particularly a scam or whatever it is in the way of anti-consumer activity that is being indulged in. It gets together and ensures that the stronger of the trading standards offices takes up the cudgel and takes the enforcement action.
One of the most remarkable things about the provisions we are dealing with in the Bill is that we are on Clause 22. We know that Clauses 20 and 21 create the new authority and refer to the amalgamation of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission. Yet whereas on competition matters the new authority clearly has the powers to deal with anti-competitive activity, the Bill does not deal with the considerable number of powers which the Office of Fair Trading has built up over the years. They are left in limbo. Therefore, there is a great deal of uncertainty, except on the basis of government statements—it is not in the Bill. Only in government statements have we got some idea of who is to do the advocacy for the consumer and who is to do the other matters that my noble friend Lord Whitty has referred to in Amendment 24ZB—consumer education, consumer advice, consumer advocacy and the enforcement of redress.
4.30 pm
We just heard from my noble friend Lady Crawley that consumer advice is destined for the citizens advice bureaux. My worry there is that they have a lot to do, they have a difficult time at the moment because of lack of resources and I hope that the Government will ensure that they have adequate resources. Then there is trading standards and so on, but there is no overall responsibility spelled out in the Bill for the new authority in relation to the consumer protection powers that exist at present at the Office of Fair Trading. It is what is to happen to those that is most worrying and it would be most helpful if there were something, Amendment 24ZB or something else, to create the strategic power and ability of the new authority to deal with consumer protection matters.
I have only one small point. I apologise to my noble friend Lord Whitty for raising it, but I cannot help it, as a lawyer. It is a lawyerly sort of point. He mentioned all these matters—education, advice and so on—as they relate to competition and fair trading. It is a remarkable thing, perhaps, but even the original Fair Trading Act 1973, which created the Office of Fair Trading, does not define fair trading. In the modern world, fair trading has come to represent not just consumer protection matters but also the matter of preferring goods that come from countries that treat their workers properly. That is not really what the Fair Trading Act 1973 was concerned with: it was concerned with consumer protection. I do not know whether my noble friend has some broader definition.