My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Trading Standards Institute, a post I occupy because I chair the council of the Property Ombudsman, which works with trading standards in relation to the world of estate agents and letting agents. I greatly welcome the Minister’s earlier announcement on fees. I also declare my interest as president of the Local Government Association.
The TSI welcomes the Bill and applauds the Government’s efforts to simplify and clarify consumer law. The real problem for the trading standards service is the startling decline in its manpower and budgets. Over the lifetime of this Parliament, the workforce will fall by almost half and budgets will be cut by an average of 40%. These reductions mean that we all face greater risk at the hands of rogue traders. New legislation needs to strengthen the hand of the remaining trading standards officers rather than in any way undermine their good work.
There are two areas of concern to the TSI in this regard. This is the first of two amendments in my name seeking to rectify these. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for adding her name to this amendment and already speaking in support of it. I am grateful also to the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, for doing likewise.
6.15 pm
Amendment 62A seeks to remove the controversial new proposal in Schedule 5 that would require trading standards officers to give at least two days’ notice before inspecting premises. At present, officers—usually acting on a tip-off or other intelligence—are free to make unannounced inspections of businesses that come within their jurisdiction.
At first sight, this new requirement would appear to make a mockery of efforts to uncover wrongdoing: providing plenty of time to hide incriminating evidence sounds like a rogue’s charter. I do not imagine that the police would welcome a duty to give 48 hours’ notice
before knocking on the door of a suspected criminal. In reality, the proposition in the Bill is not quite as daft as that. First, as we heard from the Minister, it excludes action connected to food safety. The Minister made it clear that trading standards officers can make unannounced inspections relating to food safety of supermarkets and high street shops, in parallel to their environmental health colleagues inspecting abattoirs, food processing plants and so on. After the recent horsemeat scandal, to which noble Lords have referred, everyone understands that unannounced visits relating to food standards and food safety are important.
However, consumer protection is not only about food. What about shops believed to be selling alcohol under counterfeit labels? Such products are known often to contain methanol, which can cause blindness. The illicit trading of cigarettes under counterfeit labels also represents a health hazard. Trading standards officers need to be able to look under the counter, go to the back of the shop or inspect the warehouse without giving 48 hours’ notice. What about the sale of unsafe goods, perhaps from a market trader? There was the terrible example in May of this year of a house fire in Sheffield caused by a faulty electrical charger, which killed five people. What is sensible for food safety is surely sensible for other areas where consumers need protection from traders intent on ripping them off.
Secondly, there are let-out clauses in paragraph 23 of the schedule that say that an officer need not give the minimum two days’ notice if the officer,
“reasonably considers that to give notice … would defeat the purpose of the entry”
or,
“reasonably suspects that there is an imminent risk to public health or safety”.
Those exemptions would seem to negate the new process in a large number of cases, since the purpose of the entry is very likely to be the detection of a failure to adhere to required standards, and that purpose would be defeated by giving a period of notice of the visit.
If these let-out clauses are intended to give trading standards officers proper discretion in deciding whether to give advance warning of their visit, are they really serving any purpose in the Bill? At present, where trading standards officers want to visit in order to give good advice to a responsible business, they will already make an appointment. Therefore is the proposed new requirement really pretty harmless? The trouble is that if and when the trading standards officer takes a trader to court, arguments seem inevitable over the interpretation of these let-out clauses. When is a risk to public health “imminent”? Would giving notice really have defeated “the purpose of the entry”? How do we define “reasonable”? And so on.
The two days’ notice period, therefore, is likely to raise legal arguments, create uncertainty and give succour to those seeking to disregard consumer rights. In today’s risk-averse world, many officers will feel they must back off from making unannounced inspections—even where shocking cases of bad behaviour are suspected—for fear of offending the proposed new rule.
It is interesting to note that Ofsted, following a period of only carrying out school inspections after giving notice, has recently reverted to unannounced visits following the high-profile cases in Birmingham, and, of course, the public has demanded that the Care Quality Commission make spot checks of residential care homes to ensure that they are meeting the necessary standards. Therefore, in other fields where inspections of premises are required, there is no argument about the merits of these being unannounced.
We are all supportive of efforts by BIS to reduce bureaucracy, but this measure would undermine an important service and it would add a layer of extra form-filling and administration created by the need to issue—according to the Government’s impact assessment—nearly 7,000 notices of intention to inspect each year, at considerable extra cost to a service with serious budgetary constraints. Amendment 62A seeks to remove from the Bill a measure which could undermine a vital service already seriously overstretched. I beg to move.