Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-10-24
Topic: Domestic Commerce
John Kevin Sharkey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, in moving Amendment 1 I will also speak—eventually—to Amendments 2 and 7. They form a linked package of consumer protection measures enabled by, and consequential upon, Amendment 1. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for adding their names to the amendments and for their support for them. Amendment 1 simply adds consumer protection to the functions of the SFGB. The notion of consumer protection is implicit in the other functions set out in the Bill, but the amendment gives it statutory life. In doing this, it allows a broader definition of the reach of the SFGB. It widens its remit to something closer to the real-world situation for consumers and enables it to deal more comprehensively with the dangers and risks that consumers face Pensions guidance, debt advice and money guidance are all aimed at doing this, of course, but there are related areas where intervention would be of direct benefit: cold calling is one. One effect of Amendment 1 would be to allow cold calling to be dealt with in the Bill. We have discussed cold calling many times during the passage of the Bill and on many other occasions in this House. On several occasions I have described it as an omnipresent menace—and no one has disagreed. It is clear that there is a firm and widely held dislike of and dissatisfaction with cold calling, extending well beyond this Chamber. It is not only a thoroughgoing social nuisance; it is often a threat, directly and comprehensively, to consumers’ financial well-being. It is often an invitation—or more exactly, an inducement —to criminal activity The figures are remarkable and very alarming. There are now 2.6 million cold calls every month; that number has increased by 180% in the last 10 months. I noted that the Minister, when presented with these figures—and even larger ones—at an earlier stage in the debate, prayed in aid the ICO and the FCA. I am afraid that whatever the ICO is doing, and whatever the noble Baroness hopes the FCA might do at some unspecified time in the future, the problem is not only terrifyingly large but continuing to grow very rapidly. On the fourth day of Committee, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, made a very telling intervention; I am sure he will not mind me repeating it here. He quoted a Which? report from November 2016, which he described as detailing, "the full horror of nuisance calls in the UK".—[Official Report, 13/9/17; col. 2491.] The report found that in 17 of the 18 cities surveyed, more than a third of all private phone calls were nuisance calls, and four in 10 people in the Scottish sample were intimidated by these calls. It is not easy to intimidate people in Scotland. In the same debate, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, pointed out and emphasised the fact that many old people are particularly vulnerable to cold callers Then there is the successor to the whiplash scandal: the absolutely huge, and rising, number of claims for alleged holiday sickness. In July and August 2016 alone, one operator took 750,000 British, 800,000 German and 375,000 Scandinavian customers to Spain. The Scandinavians lodged 39 claims; the Germans lodged 114; but the British lodged around 4,000 claims for holiday sickness—essentially, food poisoning. That kind of thing not only costs our travel industry a huge amount and raises prices for everyone but directly encourages criminal acts on a large scale. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said in Committee, this a huge industry which, "encourages fraud and leads people to do things which they would never have done without this pressure".—[Official Report, 13/9/17; col. 2489.]