Specialist Lawyers At Irwin Mitchell Comment On Today’s Announcement.

In the much-awaited post-Brexit Budget and his first as Chancellor, Philip Hammond has announced that the government will shortly bring forward a green paper to examine consumer markets that are not working efficiently or fairly and will introduce new consumer protection measures, despite the Consumer Rights Act (CRA) only having come into force in 2015.

The CRA was presented by the Government as the biggest overhaul of consumer rights in a generation which had the purpose of consolidating existing law into one, consumer friendly, easy to read, Act.

However, less than two years later and with many consumers understood to be not exercising or understanding their rights, the Government intends to adopt even further measures in a bid to adequately protect consumers.

These include:

• legislating at the earliest opportunity to allow consumer enforcement bodies, such as the Competition and Markets Authority, to ask the courts to order civil fines against firms that mislead or mistreat consumers;
• developing proposals to protect consumers from facing unexpected payments when a subscription is renewed or when a free trial ends; and
• considering how to make terms and conditions clearer, shorter and simpler for consumers This builds on the government’s “call for evidence” from March last year on terms and conditions, which addressed the issue of consumers facing overly lengthy and complex terms and conditions.

Expert Opinion

“The CRA does not permit unfair terms, but with it only granting the authorities limited enforcement powers, namely permitting authorities to go to court to impose a fine only if a company refuses to cooperate and allowing enforcers to apply to the courts for an injunction, and consumers themselves being unlikely to seek to enforce their rights through a court, many companies have continued to trade as they did pre-CRA.

“Importantly, therefore, the Government has announced today that it intends to give the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) new enforcement powers, including giving the CMA an ability to ask a civil court to impose a fine for breaching consumer law.

“Whilst the underlying policy reasoning is clear to see, we can only hope that the work done to simplify consumer law by consolidating and combining existing statutes will not now be slowly unravelled.

“Only time will tell as to how these proposed changes will be implemented but in the meantime, it is a useful reminder to ensure that your Terms and Conditions and trade practices are CRA compliant and as user friendly as possible.”
Stuart Padgham - Partner