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Dr Kim Howells - Former Minister for Consumers and Corporate Affairs (Jul 1998 - Jun 2001)Institute of Trading Standards Administration Annual Conference |
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This conference takes as its theme the Consumer White Paper. In it, we set out our aims for confident consumers and modern markets. The challenge now is to put this strategy in place. By the end of the next three days, I hope you will have a clearer picture of the way ahead, and the important role the trading standards community can play. I want to begin by paying some tributes. First, to all those in trading standards who helped us draw up our consumer strategy. The White Paper was very much a team exercise, an excellent example of the collaboration we wish to encourage. I want to thank everyone here who helped, whether through contributions to policy discussions or through providing examples of scams and rogues that need to be stopped. Secondly, to the Institute itself. Your support in raising the profile of consumer issues has been excellent and is much appreciated. I look forward to joining you later today at your photocall to highlight the problems of counterfeiting. You have, as sponsors, some of the best companies in the world and I know that counterfeiting is a big problem for them. Thirdly, to John Bridgeman, who, as many of you will know, will be stepping down at the end of September after five years as Director General of Fair Trading. During his period of office, John has been a tireless supporter of your service. He has led the OFT through a period of major change, restructuring the organisation to prepare it for the implementation of the Competition Act, and enhancing the OFT's consumer role: an area which can easily be overlooked. It is a tribute to John's leadership that OFT has the morale, confidence and skills to move forward effectively into the new Millennium. I should like to thank him and wish him well for the future. Finally, to your chairman, David Sibbert, for his leadership, his hard work, but most of all for inviting me to speak to your conference not once, but twice! Adlai Stevenson famously said that 'A politician is a person who approaches every problem with an open mouth'. Given the range of consumer problems, I am sure I will have no difficulty filling the time allotted to me. This Government is committed to helping people get a good deal. The needs of consumers are our priorities. We want to put their interests at the heart of policy-making. Not just in DTI but across Government. Later today, David Lock in the Lord Chancellor's Department will explain how the Community Legal Service will help deliver our vision of a joined-up, accessible and high quality consumer advice network. Tomorrow, Steve Bassam, who has close links with the Institute and even closer links with Brighton, will look at how trading standards can help in the fight against crime. Across Government, we are working to put the consumer first. The White Paper itself was a momentous occasion. And we have taken a number of strides since its publication. We have brought in new pricing rules, improving the visibility of prices and making it easier for people to compare them for different goods. We have stopped dual pricing on cash machines. We have changed the rules on APRs to make clearer the true costs of low-start mortgages. We have undertaken roadshows to publicise the damage that fake goods can cause consumers and honest businesses. This has given me the opportunity to see at first hand the efforts trading standards officers across the country are making to stamp out counterfeiting. In the field of consumer safety, we have continued to show that good, proportionate and targeted regulation can make a difference. I am today publishing research into the effectiveness of the 1988 Furniture and Furnishing Regulations. These were introduced after a rise in the number of fatalities in house fires in the 1980s. There were serious and well-documented concerns about the ease with which upholstered furniture caught fire. We often hear about the economic costs and benefits of regulation. In this case, it's possible to show graphically in human terms what the effect has been. Over 700 lives have been saved because of the regulations. Nearly 6,000 fewer serious injuries have occurred. I have no doubt that these regulations are essential to public safety and to maintaining confidence in the British furniture industry. We have raised the profile of these consumer and safety issues since the White Paper but there is still much to do and some of it will require new legislation. We have been looking at possible changes to consumer law and I will say more about this on Thursday. But some can be achieved now, by encouraging existing agencies to work more effectively. The White Paper states clearly the Government's commitment to a modern trading standards service. We need a service that meets local needs but provides national consistency. The key is better collaboration: better collaboration with other services in your authority, with other authorities in your region and with other enforcement agencies. The need for better collaboration is particularly evident in the area of consumer advice and representation. Our vision is for joined-up network of advice agencies, delivering a seamless and high-quality service. More visible, more accessible and more consistent. I recognised the criticisms in the Audit Commission's report on trading standards about the variability in the provision of consumer advice. They struck a powerful note but our proposals in the White Paper will deal with them. Our proposals will build on the Community Legal Service in England and Wales. I am keen for trading standards authorities to play their full part in it. I urge you to apply for the CLS quality mark. This will be a key building block for participation in our proposed consumer support networks, about which you will be hearing more later this year. I now want to turn to the matter of consumer representation. I am looking very carefully at how best we might change it. I am not interested in funding bodies which are little other than collecting boxes for complaints and publishers of well-meaning annual reports. I want to be able to measure their success in making a difference to the quality and availability of goods and services purchased by consumers day in and day out. I want them to be high profile, campaigning bodies who are under a duty to work with whomever it takes - including trading standards departments - to research and devise solutions to problems which affect consumers - especially the most vulnerable consumers. That is why I have asked my officials in the DTI to undertake an intensive and immediate survey of the whole landscape of consumer representation research and enforcement - to ensure that we have a clear image of who is doing what, where; why they are doing it and are they doing it effectively. That includes, for example, the giving of consumer advice and information and trying to judge whether or not the present bodies: Citizens Advice Bureau, Community Legal Service, Money Advice, the OFT, Small Business Service, also Trading Standards and so on are reaching the numbers of people, and informing the providers of goods and services, and informing government at local and national level - in the way that they ought to. I have no doubt in my mind, that there could be - and must be - much better co-operation than exists at present and that we can win much better value for taxpayers' money and offer a more satisfactory and visible service than exists at present. All of these bodies have tried their level best. I am certain, and some - despite sometimes being strapped for cash - have succeeded in making a difference. I am extremely grateful to so many people for the way in which they have volunteered their time, their professionalism and their expertise. I have sometimes been condemned for not valuing the role they have played. Let me make it clear: I want to make much more of that voluntarism, professionalism and expertise. There is a wealth of provision of consumer advice. My aim is to improve the quality and coverage of it. I want to remove duplication. I want to see effective partnerships. I want a seamless network. You in trading standards are the key, along with CABx and with the advent of the CLS, to making this happen. Collaboration can also increase the effectiveness of our safety awareness work. Improving consumer safety is very much about protecting the vulnerable in our society, such as children and older people. And we can often do this by raising awareness of the hazards and dangers of everyday life. We are building on the success of our fireworks safety toolkit and will be producing another one this year. I am not sure whether I should mention football - Rugby is, after all, a far more civilised game - but only last week I teamed up with Sir Geoff Hurst to spread the message about preventing older people from falling on stairs. I am continually staggered by the horrific statistic that almost 1000 older people a year die due to a fall on the stairs. However if our safety awareness work is to strike home we need your support. Later this year, we aim to launch a new home safety network. We aim to bring together everyone who has a part to play in reducing accidents in the home: the fire service, environmental health, social services, health promotion and, above all, trading standards. Our aim is facilitate awareness initiatives, spread good practice and ensures that local networks are developed. Only by working together can we can get our messages across to their greatest effect. Collaboration between local authorities is also important. There are many examples already where authorities are working well together but we want to stimulate more. I'm therefore very happy to be able to announce that the DTI will be supporting some exciting new trading standards projects. We announced a half million pound fund for innovative projects addressing cross-boundary issues earlier this year. We had an excellent response from Trading Standards groups. A total of 30 bids, on behalf of 315 authorities, bidding for a total of one and a half million pounds. So my officials sat down with LACOTS a couple of weeks back. They emerged a day later after carefully considering each bid, haggard but smiling, with a great list of projects.
As always happens in these exercises, there were some good ideas which occurred to more than one group. Four groups - Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, a western Scottish group led by Glasgow, the Yorkshire and Humberside Trading Standards Liaison Group, and I'm delighted to say the Society of Directors of Public Protection in Wales -- all suggested an Intranet of known rogue traders. We and LACOTS want to bring all this thinking together, rather than fund a number of small projects at the same time. So we've encouraged the authorities concerned to work up their ideas jointly and have offered to fund this work. Both Crossing the Boundaries and the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities came up with excellent proposals for establishing a national database for samples results. This should help cut down on unnecessary work and point to gaps in testing. We're able to fund these two groups to work together in developing their ideas. All in all I think this has been a success. I hope you found the process of working together to construct the bids helpful. There was certainly great diversity and considerable innovation in the bids. In those bids selected we have an exciting range of issues, from social exclusion to e-commerce. And I have been glad that we have been able to support bids from all over Britain, with successful projects from Wales, Scotland and the North and South of England. The hard work is now yours. But we are keen to help in disseminating the findings, so that the whole of the trading standards community benefits. I know there are things we and you can do better in future. The six weeks you had to put bids together wasn't enough. And we can do more, with ITSA and others, to agree criteria for such exercises in future. We will. This leads on to my final point - the need for a better and more clearly defined relationship between central and local government. I still believe that, as a service, trading standards must be delivered locally, to tackle local problems in local markets. But, as the Audit Commission acknowledged, those who call for a regional or national service are becoming more vocal. I have no doubt that we require much better collaboration at regional level and greater consistency at a national level. Central government can help in this respect. We can let you know the outcomes we want to see you deliver. We can give you better performance indicators, focused not on inputs but on outputs, not on punishing transgressors, but instead on securing compliance. We can indicate minimum levels of performance and give you the scope to go beyond these to meet local priorities. This need for central government to give a clearer steer to local government becomes more important when enforcement functions are shared between the two. For a long time, there has been joint responsibility with the Director General of Fair Trading for enforcing parts of the Consumer Credit Act. More recently, we have brought in shared responsibilities for attacking unfair contract terms. More shared powers will come with implementation of the Injunctions Directive by the end of this year and with the amendment of Part III of the Fair Trading Act, when Parliamentary time allows. This all demands a new relationship in the field of consumer affairs between central and local government. On Thursday, I will set out our thoughts on this. And more than that, I will try to answer any questions you have on this and on possible changes to the law. I welcome very much the opportunity for a discussion on the way ahead. The trading standards service is facing the most challenging period in its history. I hope that by the end of this conference you have a better idea of the way ahead. I wish you success. |
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Other speeches by Dr Kim Howells - Former Minister for Consumers and Corporate Affairs (Jul 1998 - Jun 2001) |
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