My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s comments. She is right to have responded to the discussions we had in Committee. I am sure my noble friend Lord Sugar will be looking to hire her shortly, given how much she has responded to what he said through his surrogate, my noble friend Lord Haskel.
I shall ask a couple of questions because, although I am not against this, I am reflecting on the earlier discussions in Committee and the letter received on 5 November from the Minister in relation to free digital content. I am intrigued by her remarks, which are, I think, really about a situation where there has been a consideration—I assume money has passed—so we are talking about content that has been supplied because of a contract that has been established between a consumer and a trader. I am grateful to Pauline McBride of Glasgow University, who raised this point with me, and I shall put a couple of questions to the Minister which arise from the correspondence I have been having with her.
At another point in Committee, my noble friend Lord Knight mentioned that customers frequently supply non-monetary consideration for the supply of digital content. Promises and undertakings made by a consumer under a website terms of use are a good example. There is no doubt that clicking on terms of use or some form of conditions, for example, with a well known retailer, would be an example of entering into an arrangement with a supplier of digital content, but is it a contract? If it is, clearly one or two of the things that the Minister said are going to be raised. If it is not a contract, because it is not a monetary consideration, then what exactly are we talking about?
The reason for worrying about this is that research suggests that providers of websites through which access is provided to digital content are applying terms and conditions, warranty disclaimers and indemnity provisions which limit the consumer’s rights. Providers may not be able to circumvent the statutory considerations —even limited to those in the Bill, which I object to them being—but consumers will not be able to get full redress if they have self-limited themselves through clicking on to terms of use created by the website which have somehow reduced the quality of the redress they can get from the original provider. I am taking a long time to describe this, but I hope the Minister understands the point I am trying to make. I am worried about consumers who are not paying a monetary consideration but who are engaging in a contractual arrangement with a website being excluded from normal redress provisions on the grounds that there has been no monetary consideration. If the Minister could write to me on that, I would be quite happy. There is also a question about what happens if the contractual obligations being placed are such that they would not be recognised under the Bill.