UK Parliament / Open data

Consumer Rights Bill

Perhaps I could make one point about the idea of new legislation, which I think is what the noble Baroness is calling for. We are very concerned not to stop legitimate organisations that do provide added-value services related to those provided by government from advertising via search engines. That is an important objective; there are always two sides to these questions. At the same time, as I said earlier so robustly, we want to stop those who make false or misleading claims, who do not provide any added value to users, and who thus understandably frustrate and upset those who, as in the example given by the noble Baroness, choose the wrong sort of website.

The difficulty is that people’s behaviour and expectations with regard to these services are constantly evolving and difficult to predict. That is why we are pursuing the option of supporting search engines in assessing whether a third party that is offering services

related to a government website is actually a genuine one which complies with the search engine’s own policies. I think that it would be difficult for us to do this on our own. We have set up the website page www.gov.uk/misleading websites, which I mentioned earlier, and we will monitor the effectiveness of this approach over the coming months. We need to work in this evolving and important area, and I can assure the noble Baroness that we are determined to make a difference.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
756 cc321-2GC 
Session
2014-15
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
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