Clause 11
Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill
5:45 pm
Ian McCartney (Minister of State (Trade & Investment), Department of Trade and Industry; Makerfield, Labour)
I will try to give the hon. Gentleman a rational explanation of what we are attempting to achieve with the clause. I accept from the outset that it is a probing amendment, and I hope to give a response to it and to provide the Committee with information that will be helpful in relation to the clause.
Clause 11 will provide the new council with general powers of investigation, and subsection (1)(a) will permit the council to investigate
“a complaint made by or on behalf of a consumer which appears to the Council to raise one or more issues of general relevance”.
A consumer could make a specific complaint on their own behalf and a wider issue could be raised by a general complaint. We need the capacity to deal with wider issues, while dealing with specific issues raised by the individual consumer. In other words, a distinction will be drawn between the investigation of a complaint that may be relevant to consumers generally and an individual complaint. The new council will not have a role in the investigation of individual complaints, other than those made by vulnerable consumers in the designated sectors.
The Bill will provide new and better ways to handle individual complaints and introduce new complaints handling standards, which will be set by the regulators in energy and postal services. It will provide a new redress scheme to determine issues that cannot be resolved by a consumer’s supplier.
On general complaints, subsection (2) empowers the new council to investigate complaints that involve novel issues that affect a group of consumers or consumers generally, or that may have an important effect on a group of consumers or consumers generally. The hon. Gentleman asked what a novel issue will be, and my practical explanation is that, as I said at the outset, it is an issue that is raised in a way that has wider implications for consumers’ rights in the marketplace. Therefore, a judgment will be made ina particular instance about what would affect such changes.