My Lords, I thank the Minister and other noble Lords who have spoken. I thank, in particular, the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, for her support. I hope that I will be able to reciprocate but I shall have to wait to hear what she says.
My noble friend Lady Crawley has done a lot in relation to the trading standards organisation. It is important to recognise that the TSI and trading standards offices up and down the country have been engaged with the Government and others in considering what the new landscape looks like. There are two aspects to this. One is that the Minister referred to strengthening and better equipping trading standards bodies to perform the enforcement role, as well as the educational role, which will now also become part of their responsibilities. However, that cannot be done in an atmosphere of fewer resources. The Minister quite rightly said that we are starting from a position of hugely differential funding for trading standards bodies up and down the country, and the NAO also rightly pointed that out, but there is no clarity on how we will address that, let alone on increasing the aggregate amount of resources for the increased level of responsibility and some previously central functions which trading standards are about to take on.
The noble Lord accused my amendments of being likely to create greater confusion. However, at present there is no mention of most of what he went through in some detail. I need to read his words carefully but I think that it needs to be set out more carefully in the public document. There is no mention of the words “national trading standards”, SIPEP, Citizens Advice, or indeed Consumer Focus for that matter. To get clarity, we need a better understanding of where previously central statutory functions are now going. To go back to the money point, we also need to ensure that, when the transfers are made, at least commensurate resources are transferred with them. In the area of consumer advocacy, for example, I know that Citizens Advice
has been asked to take on the role of Consumer Focus and, prior to that, activities that came under the NCC.
The Minister referred to £3.7 million. My recollection is that in the last year of the National Consumer Council and the first year of Consumer Focus, the budget for that role—the non-regulated industries part of Consumer Focus—was around £6 million. That was four years ago. Therefore, there is a serious cut and Citizens Advice is not being given a commensurate amount of money to perform the function previously carried out by Consumer Focus.
I fear that the same is likely to be applied to trading standards offices and that they will be asked to do more in a different way—in some cases, starting from scratch—without commensurate resources. At the very least, the Government ought to put in the Bill clarity about where all those responsibilities are going. They should be obliged to produce regulations at a later stage when the transfers are taking place and attach to the resources that they are handing over those that related to responsibilities which were previously central and are now to be carried out at local or third sector level.
I think that the last thing the Bill provides is clarity, and I will be coming back to that point in other contexts, as I am sure others will. The new consumer landscape, or new trading standards landscape, is not spelt out in the Bill. There is some support for some of the measures that the Government are introducing—there is no doubt about that—and there are those who would like to see them set out slightly differently. However, the point I am making is that that is not in the Bill—there is no clarity. Parliament has not been asked to approve or sanction the way in which these transfers are likely to take place and the way in which those responsibilities are in future likely to be delivered and effected. So I do not really accept much of what the Minister says about this part of the Bill. We will undoubtedly return to it.
In reply to my noble friend Lord Borrie, who asked about the fair trading dimension, I am all in favour of the fair trade label and what it does to improve the conditions of workers, particularly in the third world, and the conditions of the environment. That was not what I intended here, and perhaps some better wording would convey the fact that we are not concerned just about market structures but about how providers and buyers of services and goods treat their consumers and suppliers. We need a term that is probably no longer “fair trading”—that is confusing—that reflects the range of responsibilities of market abuse in this Bill.
I am sorry to say that the Minister did not entirely convince me. He has not really satisfied me that, under the new set-up, consumer protection—however much of an advantage it is in the market structure areas—will be carried out as effectively, efficiently and in as good a way as it was under the previous structure. Therefore, I am in no doubt that, while I am withdrawing the amendment now, we will return to something like these propositions at a later stage.