My Lords, from what the Minister said and in conjunction with the points raised by my noble friend Lord Harris, I think the Government
are saying, essentially, that it would be too much work for government departments to approve websites offering additional services. The point I wanted to make—as my noble friend did—is that that does not really make sense, for a couple of reasons. First, the extra work is minimal. Indeed, as my noble friend pointed out, it appears that it is already being done to some extent at the moment. Secondly, that extra work—whatever it may be—is insignificant when compared to the detriment being done to the consumer. That is the point we must consider here.
We also have to take into account all the time currently spent by government departments or other offices answering consumer complaints in this area. For example, the DVLA has received 170 complaints about scam websites since 1 March. The Home Office, in nine months in 2013, received 590 written customer complaints about scam passport sites. As for TfL, it had an extraordinary 1,000 complaints a day. Does not that shed some light on one of the reasons why TfL has been so proactive in this area? Would it not be helpful if Government encouraged other providers to be just as helpful to the consumer?
The other problem with the Government’s approach of leaving it really up to Google to monitor websites is that although Google has agreed to take down some of the adverts and monitor future ones, this requires much more continuous monitoring work than cutting off copycat websites at source. Critically, this approach also inevitably leaves some consumers unprotected for some stretches of time, and therefore undermines consumer rights. As my noble friend Lord Harris made clear, these websites are big business. They make their living by inflicting detriment on the consumer in an entirely parasitic manner. If we are all to play our part, it must include legitimate providers taking the time to say whether a site provides an additional service. That is the purpose of these amendments.
At the start of her speech the noble Baroness said that these sites need to be stopped. I welcome that forthright attitude, but I am sure she will understand my disappointment that it simply is not being followed up with what would be very simple measures.