Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (Alternative Dispute Resolution) (Conferral of Functions) Regulations 2026

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for introducing the statutory instruments. This is not a very complicated issue and I do not have much to say about it, but I do have one or two questions.

First, this emerged from the digital markets Bill, which I was happy to play a part in. I was a bit surprised to see, on the duty to provide reports, that the reports have to be provided to the Secretary of State in writing on a “durable medium”. I wonder why the Government’s choice of words on this appears to rule out the possibility that we might go digital on these as well as many other things. Will my noble friend reflect on that when he replies?

Secondly, my more serious point is about costs and cost recovery. Clearly, an operation such as this under the CTSI must be paid for, but the way it is framed in the instruments before us means that these fees will come only from consumers. If the ADR is to work effectively, it really should be a benefit to both sides: it should be a benefit to the companies that are being queried about by consumers as well as to the consumers. I understand the point about the consumers being charged only a fair fee—this is well laid out in Schedule 1. Can the Minister say why we are not expecting costs to be recovered from those who also benefit from the system—the companies concerned? Obviously, the last thing we want is to find that this is a huge extra burden on already-burdened consumers, who have to pay through the nose both for their own case but also for the case being answered by the other side.

My third point is more general. There does not seem to be much in the documents before us about reviewing these arrangements. This is quite a big change; it is a measure that will set up quite a complex structure. It will be to the benefit of consumers, and I welcome it, but there is a question about whether it will be reviewed and looked at. Can the Minister reflect on that when he responds?

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his introduction, which was very clear, and to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, who asked some of the questions I was going to ask, which is good. I too worked on the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. It seems longer ago than 2024, and it took a bit of dredging up to come back to this.

In general, we welcome the idea of strengthening the ADR process and how that might then get more people to use it, rather than go into more lengthy disputes —we can talk about that at the end. In the past, as we hear, there was a voluntary registration system, and it would be interesting to hear about the number of practitioners—it would be useful to know the scale—who will need to be registered. Of those, how many were already registered? Do the ones who are currently registered, having volunteered to register, have to reregister themselves and go through another process? What is the scale of the number of dispute resolution operations that will have to be registered? What is the actual process of registration? Is it, “Fill in this online form and you get your registration certificate over the internet”, or are there four-day visits from 15 inspectors—or is it somewhere between that and Ofsted? There is no sense of the scale of what getting registered will mean or indeed of what the cost of getting registered will be.

We need some sense of the scale of the task that the CTSI will have to undertake, which then raises the question: does the CTSI have the capacity to pick this job up? There will be a big fat bulge of people needing to be dealt with at the front end of this. What happens in the meantime? If I were a currently registered or unregistered practitioner and I put my application into the CTSI, would I not then be able to trade until such time as I had my registration, or is there a grace period through which I could continue to operate until the CTSI had sufficient resources to deal with my case? How does the conveyor belt work and will the CTSI have sufficient capacity to handle what will be a really heavy workload at the front, which will obviously then tail off?

The Minister talked about monitoring, which is an interesting concept. What is the CTSI? It is a group of people. How will they monitor these cases? What data will they use? How will they monitor the process? Will they require certain documentation from their registrants on a regular basis? Will a reregistration process be required after five years, three years or whatever? The monitoring is an important element, but it is not clear to me whether the CTSI has experience in any of this kind of process. It is not an organisation that I know and I do not wish to cast aspersions on it—I am not—but I wonder about it, because it is being thrust into a whole new set of operations.

Will there be a process that can be led, which puts together a register of what these businesses are and promotes that register so that people who are in dispute have somewhere to go? Frankly, if I was in dispute, I would not know off the top of my head that there was an ADR process or where to go to get sufficient help with it. Who has accountability for promoting the process and getting people to use it? Obviously, it is preferable to clogging up the courts with endless cases. As is often the case, in principle this is great but the practice is still a bit mysterious, so I would welcome some answers to those questions.

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[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a really important point. Let me take that away and consult with the team and I will come back to him with a response on that.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

The Minister answered very fully the question about the fees and how they would be monitored, but those were the fees to the consumers. I asked a separate question about why it did not seem to be a cost to the provider of the services, who would also benefit from the ADR. If he does not have the answer, perhaps he could write to me.

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

I think I did cover that but, if I did not, I will come back. The accredited providers will charge only a fee that is agreed already with the CTSI. That will be agreed up front and that will be published so that consumers know the charges they will be subject to. Perhaps we can pick this up afterwards. If that is not sufficient, I am happy to take further questions and to come back with a more detailed answer.