My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 28 and I emerge once again from my long and deep perusal of Hansard, having not been present in Committee. I want to focus on the important matter that has been raised by my noble friend Lady Oppenheim-Barnes on the question of displaying rights at the point of sale.
I have read the amendment carefully, but I want to focus initially on a couple of issues. The amendment states:
“Suppliers of goods and services to which this Part applies shall be required to display at the point of sale essential information in plain and intelligible language and in a reasonable format which explains to customers the relevant rights and responsibilities of consumers under this Part”.
How does one define “essential information”? I note proposed new subsection (3), which states:
“The detail shall be developed by the British Standards Institution”,
but I would like to point out that in proposed new subsection (2), which states that the,
“information shall be proportionate to the transaction”,
two issues arise. I would argue that it is very broad and not clear enough, as with proposed new subsection (1), to be on the face of the Bill. When one is talking about being “proportionate to the transaction”, one has to bear in mind that sales take the form of so many different types of products. There could be a very high volume of low-priced products, so there would be an immediate issue of how to tackle it.
I digress slightly and want to go back to the Committee stage, as I took a keen interest in the speech given by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. I am interested and glad to see that she has stepped back from promoting the idea of consumers’ statutory rights being read to them, or given to them at the point of sale. Perish the thought that this might happen and that on a busy Saturday long queues form at petrol stations while cashiers struggle to meet legal requirements in reading customer rights when selling non-petrol or non-food goods. I am sure that the noble Baroness did not necessarily think about that aspect, and she may well have thought at that stage that such information could be placed on a receipt. Then there was the matter of gaining consistency in this aspect of the law in tandem with effecting adequate training for cashiers and sales staff. I feel that, inadvertently, we may have prevented a gain in incidents on the shop floor as a result of consumers becoming somewhat impatient while waiting to be served.
The important point was made in Committee that communicating consumer rights is relevant for each product sold and could be open to confusion when a trader’s policies and terms exceed the statutory rights. There is a danger that reading out rights might act as a negative or chilling factor by implying, perhaps tenuously, that the product might just be defective.
I wanted to put this amendment in context because I am pleased at least that my noble friend Lady Oppenheim-Barnes has reduced that position in her amendment so that information on consumer rights should be displayed but only at the point of sale. However, as she might expect, I am not in favour of this being set in law either. I believe that it is proportionate to set firm guidelines, which came out of the implementation group, and to go for a voluntary approach.
I believe that this particular departure will undertake a number of key points. First, it will lead to a behavioural change for businesses to display information on the rights of consumers. Secondly, it will be pour encourager les autres; in other words, other businesses will do the same. Thirdly, consumers will become more attuned and astute, so that where businesses are not voluntarily displaying high-level information on their rights, they will be pulled up. There is a caveat that after a while consumers will tire of seeing the same old notices being displayed and looking even more tired than themselves.
For all those reasons, I do not agree with the idea that this amendment should be set in law, so it should not go forward.