Speech by: Gareth Thomas MP
Venue: Home Improvement Summit, BIS Conference Centre, 1 Victoria Street, London

Thank you for coming along this lunch time to talk through how we raise confidence in the home improvement sector.

Consumer Direct received almost 80,000 complaints last year about builders, plumbers, electricians, decorators and other home improvement traders concerning sub-standard services.

We’ve all heard the extreme cases; the horror stories about cowboy builders who take hard earned cash from customers, but often leave a job either unfinished or badly done.

The vast majority of traders in this sector are reputable, but they are let down by the small minority of untrustworthy businesses who can cause so much damage to the industry by exploiting consumers – often causing huge distress or financial misery.

Helping Consumers – Key Actions

I believe there are three key actions that we need to take to help consumers and the majority of traders in this area.

Firstly, we need to strengthen our enforcement action to root out the rogues more effectively.

Just this morning the OFT have published their evaluation of the impact of the fair trading work of local authority Trading Standards Services in the UK.

The report highlights the good job that Trading Standards are already doing to tackle unfair trading practices and to advise and assist members of the public who suffer consumer problems.

It is estimated that their work in this area, delivers direct savings to consumers of at least £347m per year.

For every £1 that Trading Standards spend on these aspects of their work, they deliver direct consumer savings of at least £6.

We must continue to build on this good work. And the White Paper this summer will look at ways we can boost the powers of Trading Standards to help them deal more effectively with modern trading conditions.

Amongst these tougher powers, we will look in particular at further enforcement for tackling online fraudsters, who can be highly sophisticated and mobile working across regional and national boundaries.

This builds on the success of regional Scambuster teams who target the most serious scams and rogues who persistently and deliberately set out to defraud consumers.

These Scambuster teams have bee operational for almost 3 years and have uncovered £28 m worth of fraud and made almost £5 m worth of savings for consumers.

We want to make it easier for consumers to get their money back from a business that does not put things right when something has gone wrong.

We want, for example, to champion consumer compensation by encouraging businesses to refund consumers or restore any harm done, as part of a new enforcement approach by trading standards.

Secondly, we need to do more to support businesses by promoting the majority of traders out there that are working fairly and honestly.

There are good schemes that are working across the country but we must do more to encourage more responsible traders to join, and more local authorities and trade organisations as possible to get involved in these schemes.

For example the TrustMark initiative which the Government has developed in partnership with the construction industry and with a series of consumer protection organisations by setting acceptable standards of competency and customer care in an industry-inclusive structure.

There is also the Buy with Confidence scheme. That is operating predominantly in the South which allows one business approved by a Local Authority to be accepted in all other member authorities. You will hear more about the remit of these schemes over the course of the sessions.

These and the schemes that some of you here today operate are good examples of how we can help consumers make more informed decisions and how we can protect vulnerable consumers and encourage them to use locally and nationally approved traders.

Thirdly, we need to help consumers more to know their rights and where they can seek help and advice.

We did a general public survey of about 2000 consumers showed just under a third did not feel well informed about their consumer rights.

We should ensure consumers better know their rights and businesses can be more confident they can meet their obligations.

Consumer Direct, from whom we will hear gives clear, practical and impartial advice to consumers, enabling them to understand their rights and, crucially, to exercise them.

It also benefits legitimate businesses, and the information it collects helps the OFT, Trading Standards and others to build intelligence, determine priorities and focus their resources.

Since 2004 Consumer Direct advisers have helped around 4.4 million consumers. Last year alone, they answered almost 1.6 million calls and emails, with a further 1.4 million visits to the website. Customer satisfaction results are around 85 per cent.

Impressive though these numbers are for a relatively new service, we need to do more to reach consumers, especially the vulnerable. My Department is already working closely with OFT and Consumer Focus to launch our own national consumer rights awareness campaign later this year.

Conclusion

I hope you will see today as an opportunity to review evidence which you may have, and which you believe could be the basis for new and different ideas.

To help us identify additional actions that we can take to support you to help deliver the improvements you are going to discuss.

Thank you again for attending today’s event.