My Lords, these amendments deal with a range of issues concerning enforcement. As the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said, I have signed and fully support the numerous amendments she has tabled, and I do not intend, other than very briefly, to touch on those at all.
I said at Second Reading that improved safety will come about through this legislation only if there is effective enforcement of the various regulations that are going to be laid. As I understand it, the thrust of the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, which he will describe in more detail later on, is that they seek clarification on who is going to be responsible for enforcement and what their responsibilities will be.
My noble friend Lady Brinton, who is unable to be with us today, has an amendment that in part suggests that trading standards officers should be the ones responsible since, frankly, they have the expertise and skills and are best placed to take on the role. Indeed, I am pretty sure—although obviously, we will have to wait until we hear the Minister’s response—that trading standards officers are going to play a crucial role in enforcing the Bill and, much more significantly, the as yet unknown contents of regulations arising from it.
The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which I fully support, assumes that trading standards will be the ones who will have the key responsibility, but my noble friend’s amendments and my own Amendment 64 seek to ensure that whoever does the enforcement also has the necessary resources, including financial, to carry out the work.
When I raised this issue at Second Reading, the Minister talked about improved enforcement capability, which he said would come through the more efficient use of time, better notices, better data-sharing opportunities and the support that will be offered, such as support on technical queries from the OPSS—but not a whiff of a promise of additional funding.
At the very helpful meeting then organised by the Minister, I asked how the new burdens principle fitted into all this, whereby the Government will be expected to fund costs arising from new burdens placed on other bodies. The Minister promised to write to us, and indeed he did. He stated:
“No new burdens are being imposed”
by the Bill. He went on:
“The principal enforcement activities currently undertaken by local authorities and delivered by trading standards are not changing”.
Clearly, that is not the case, if we take into account all the regulations that will flow from this skeleton Bill. In fairness, to some extent the Minister acknowledged that. He said that there is a “potential”—an odd choice of word since we know it will happen—for the regulations to bring new burdens. He promised to continue dialogue with a new burdens team, and he pointed to the cost- recovery powers in Clause 8, clarification of which has rightly been sought by the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, in her Amendment 109.
However, we should surely be acutely aware of the current position faced by trading standards officers around the country. Frankly, they do an excellent job. Over the last year, 2023-24, trading standards prevented more than £905 million of consumer detriment in England and Wales, equating to £8.39 saved for every £1 spent. But despite that really good value for money, over the last decade, spending on trading standards has been cut by more than 50%. Over the same period, staffing levels in local authorities have fallen by between 30% and 50%. Frankly, many local authorities no longer have sufficient resources to enforce all the consumer
protection legislation for which they are responsible. Therefore, without additional resources, they certainly will not have the capability to cope with more, which might—or rather, will—come as a result of this Bill.
Whoever takes on the enforcement responsibility will need additional resources to do the job, and that will not be achieved by things such as better data sharing and support on technical queries by the OPSS. I hope the Minister can give us far more assurances than he has so far that the Government are alert to this issue. I hope that he will provide us with assurances that extra resources will be made available, as proposed by my noble friend’s amendments and my own.
I have a couple of other amendments to touch on briefly. In a sense, my Amendment 70 builds on Amendment 98, which I have signed, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley. When buying a product online, the buyer is often aware who the seller is. Amendment 98 would place a duty on the fulfilment houses that store all this stuff before it goes out to the consumer to ensure that appropriate safety legislation has been taken into account. Other amendments suggest that there should be a responsibility on online market- places to ensure that appropriate safety regulations have been met by all the products available on their platform. My Amendment 70 goes a little further and suggests that we should therefore give the consumer the right to bring a claim against the online marketplace, regardless of who the original provider of the product was, if this has not happened and they suffer as a result of the product not having met the appropriate standards.
Finally, Amendments 63 and 87 seek to expand enforcement powers by giving the relevant authority or an inspector the power to require a person to attend an interview to answer questions, a power usually known as an interview notice. In similar legislation, authorities including regulators have that power. In the Data (Use and Access) Bill that is currently before your Lordships’ House, the Government seek to give the Information Commissioner that power to give interview notices. The Government are also seeking to give the Security Industry Authority that power in the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, and the new independent football regulator, in the Football Governance Bill currently before your Lordships’ House, will be given the same power. Yet it is omitted, bizarrely, from this Bill. That means that, on the one hand, the relevant authority would have the power to enter and search premises and seize items but, on the other hand, it would not have the power to question persons about the related entry, search and seizure of those products. I find that particularly bizarre. I hope that the Minister will acknowledge this point and either accept the amendment or offer his own way forward.
I began by saying that the Bill and the regulations that flow from it will, frankly, be pretty meaningless without proper enforcement, so we need clarity about who will be responsible for that enforcement, we need to be assured of what those responsibilities will be and we need assurances that they will be properly resourced to carry out those responsibilities. On all counts, we are at present unaware of any answers to those questions, so we hope that the Minister will shed some light on this when he winds up.