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Unfair Regulations — Making Sense of it all (YEP and T & A 03/06/08)

You may recall back in April I spoke about some new regulations coming into force on 26th May called the Unfair Commercial Practices Regulations. These regulations were intended to put a general ban on all commercial practices that are deemed unfair which includes misleading and aggressive practices which would give greater protection to consumers.

Having locked myself away in my office one morning I thought I would study these regulations in detail. Three days and a beard later I surfaced and still wondered if I had got to the bottom of them. And that just seems to be the problem with the governments legislations and regulations these days. In an attempt to clarify and simplify matters they just end up complicating matters and making things much worse than they were before.

In relation to consumer protection under existing law we have terms such as “fit for purpose” and “satisfactory quality”. If a complaint could not be resolved the two sides might end up going to court and a judge would decide on whether a product was fit for purpose or of satisfactory quality. The point being there is little ambiguity and room for lawyers to argue over the definition of these.

These new regulations are so complicated and long winded that in my view there is much more ambiguity not clarity and many more definitions for the lawyers to argue about and give their interpretations on which ultimately does not help consumers.

To quote actual examples consumers don't seem to just 'buy' something the regulation states they make “transactional decisions”. Instead of 'being conned' it prohibits “anything likely to materially distort the economic behaviour of a consumer” or something “likely to significantly impair the average consumer's freedom of choice in relation to the product concerned by harassment, coercion or undue influence.”

Consumers will need a lawyer just to interpret the rules and then no doubt need a lawyer to argue over the interpretation of the rules. So are consumers greatly more protected than they used to be? I'm not so sure especially as the regulations also state that between consumer and business “no agreement is invalid solely by breach of these regulations”. So after all the pages and pages of new rules supposedly protecting consumer rights there's a clause which actually means that if a business does break the rules you're still tied in to the agreement you made. Your channel of recourse and what the government wants you to do is to report it to the Office of Fair Trading. I'm sure that will get it sorted for you. Of course that's if your complaint doesn't go to the bottom of a pile of a million or so other complaints that the Office of Fair Trading have to follow up.

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