My Lords, I am slightly reluctant to speak against the experience of the noble Baroness, Lady Oppenheim-Barnes, and indeed that of my noble friend Lady Maddock, but, going against the grain of the debate, I think that I ought to do so. We have to say that the digital economy has provided huge savings and efficiencies in payment, booking and ticket systems, and the consumer should be allowed to benefit from that. We have to encourage these changes and simply to say that we are not going to do so is basically saying that the future is the past. I do not think we can ignore them.
I take the example of easyJet, an independent company away from the utilities. Are we saying that the equivalent of easyJet, which started competing against British Airways, would not have been allowed to discount its prices and reward customers who book online? I just do not think that that is the way forward. By all means say that we do not want extra charges put on people who are paying by cheque during the transition, but do not say, as it does in this amendment, that we should not offer a discount to those who are actually giving up their money more quickly by paying with a card or by direct debit. They are allowing the banks to release the money four days ahead, so why should they not get the benefit of that? It is a cheaper way of paying. It is wrong to say that this form of progress should be held up.
The other thing I would say is that I find it slightly patronising of older people. I chair a housing association for retired people. I was staggered when we did a survey for our annual conference, where the average age was the late 70s. We asked people whether they used IT to do a certain number of things. Some 80% said that they used the internet as a phone because they were using Skype, which is cheaper. Some 80% said that they bought tickets and booked their holidays on the internet because it is cheaper. What really
shocked me as someone who worked in the newspaper industry and who thought that newspapers would always have a future because retired people would always want to read a newspaper was that 80% of them get their news from the internet. We cannot ignore these changes. What we should be concentrating on here is what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, was talking about in the debate last week. We want regular paper records to be sent to customers who are using the internet process as well as to people who pay by cheque. But please do not let us say that we are going to go back to the past by letting the banks hold on to our money for four days when we can pay directly and get a cheaper price by doing so. Retired people can get that benefit as well. We must not end that progress.