My Lords, as I said when we discussed point of sale information for goods and services in previous sessions, the Government believe that it is really important that consumers should feel confident about exercising their rights. Last Wednesday the noble Baroness, Lady King, reminded us that Martin Lewis from moneysavingexpert.com had stressed the importance of a simple and clear version of our consumer rights when he gave evidence to the BIS Select Committee on the Bill. We agree with him, which is why I am delighted that moneysavingexpert.com is one of the consumer organisations that is working with us on the high-level summary of consumer rights that the Minister and I have mentioned on a number of occasions. This summary covers our rights when we buy goods, services or digital content, and members of the implementation group are working to ensure that it is written in plain English.
In the debates relating to previous amendments concerning the requirement to provide consumer information at the point of sale or at the point of complaint, I set out the Government’s objections to requiring every single business providing goods, services and digital content to set out a consumer’s rights every time they make a purchase. Perhaps I may briefly reiterate. These were, first, that consumers are already faced with a lot of information at the point of sale, and I suspect that most of us are not going to take in information that is not immediately relevant to our purchase decision. Secondly, it is will be particularly irritating to be faced with an oral statement or handed a piece of paper setting out our rights every time we buy a newspaper in the corner shop or arrange by phone to have the dog walked—not to mention the burden this would place on the trader. Thirdly, it could cause significant confusion where the trader’s own policies were more generous
than consumers’ statutory rights or where sectoral regulation of services requires specific remedies that the trader must offer.
My noble friend the Minister mentioned the concerns of a major retailer that a requirement to set out a consumer’s basic rights would completely undermine its core message. This was that a customer who is dissatisfied for any reason could bring the product back because it wanted to do what it and the customer thought was right in the circumstances, even if that went beyond what the law would require.
In answer to a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, the British Retail Consortium has said that it would happily join in providing information at the point of sale but does not support the mandatory provision of consumer information for reasons I have given. The BRC, the Federation of Small Businesses and the British Chambers of Commerce all oppose this too.
Fourthly, it would be perplexing for consumers to have to have their attention drawn to their full rights at every point in the complaints process even in circumstances where they have said what they want and the trader has immediately agreed.
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on consumers who are sold things over the telephone and have no written follow-up, the consumer has to be given a range of pre-contractual information under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, so a situation in which a consumer does not know they are entering a contract should no longer arise, with effect from 2013. For all these reasons, we do not believe that requiring this information to be given to all consumers before they purchase goods or services or, indeed, afterwards, would achieve the best outcome for consumers or for businesses.