Consumer Affairs

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) on securing this important debate. I extend my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) on his elevation to His Majesty’s Government. It is an honour and a privilege to be a Government Minister, but there are obligations and responsibilities too. I have some asks for him, which I will come to at the end. I am sure he will listen to them and take action. I should declare an interest as a leaseholder, as I will touch on some leasehold issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington talked about a Mars bar, which took me back to my youth. I do not know what size a Mars bar was then, because we had it sliced up and shared between us. I could be getting into a bit of a “Monty Python” story, but perhaps if I had kept to that my figure would be less robust than it is today, so maybe there is an argument for that.

My hon. Friend also touched on the poverty premium. Some people are able to buy things cheaper because of where they can go to buy them. The point about differential pricing is an interesting one, and I would add that loyalty card pricing is a real concern now. It is effectively exchanging data for a discount: we can pay extra if we do not have a shop’s loyalty card. If we have a smartphone, we can jump outside, get wi-fi or a signal and perhaps download one, but we are giving away our data in order to get a discount, and the difference in price is quite extraordinary. There is a lot going with respect to pricing, and my hon. Friend addressed it particularly well. He quoted Which? a lot, and I pay tribute to it for its relentless work in standing up for consumers.

I want to talk about protecting consumers, including in financial services, and how innovation can support the consumer. Importantly, it is not all about regulation, but I will touch on that too. The Treasury Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing and whose core membership is in the room today, has been looking at a number of these issues. Obviously, there is a lot of discussion of them. The Chancellor has been clear in her Mansion House speeches about making sure the financial services sector is able to help facilitate growth. We all absolutely support that, but we need to be careful to get the balance right. The regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, has to regulate against harm while, as its secondary objective, facilitating growth. There can be a tension there.

There is an onus on us in Parliament—I am sure the Minister will have something to say about this—to make sure that our constituents are protected, and we must understand that there are different grades of understanding, particularly in the financial services area. We need to help, support and educate people, but we should recognise that there are people who will always be vulnerable and others who can be vulnerable to certain types of schemes.

The Committee has looked at finfluencers, the people who pop up on our social media feed and tell us, as they stand by their Porsche or villa with a swimming pool, how they have done very well and are going to share their tips. Of course, a number of them tip over into giving advice rather than guidance on financial services, which is a very dangerous area that the Committee is looking at. It is a challenging area to deal with. The FCA has told us that Meta—I should call it out—has not been ready to take things down very quickly when it has been alerted to them. If a major regulator like the FCA has challenges getting a major internet provider to deal with these things, then that is a really big battle.

That is a huge challenge, not just for the Government, but globally, because a lot of these people are not even based in the UK. I would be interested to know the Minister’s thinking on how we deal with that legally, even with the Online Safety Act 2023, which does not really cover a lot of this. I am not suggesting for a minute that he or the Government have a solution, because it is a very challenging problem to solve, but I am interested in what the Government are looking at.

We also have artificial intelligence coming into the financial services sector. There are examples of people who have put models into four different AI systems and come up with what is quite good guidance but very close to advice. One that I came across recently actually recommended investing in a particular named company. This is a very interesting and challenging area to regulate and, again, the Treasury Committee is looking at AI in financial services. There is an awful lot of potential, but there is a lot of risk as well. I know that it is a core area for the Department for Business and Trade to consider, along with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. I am interested to hear the Minister’s thinking on how the Government will make sure, as best they can, that they are a step ahead in protecting consumers against the risk involved.

Of course, consumers in financial services have a lot to lose. It is always said, “Don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose,” but if we are to encourage people to invest more, as the Chancellor is keen to do, we need to make sure that people really understand that and protect them from losses, which would be very damaging for many of our constituents—certainly the poorest, and even those on modest incomes who would not have the money to lose.

The FCA has also proposed allowing contactless payments to be unlimited. During covid, we saw the contactless limit go up, and it is often even higher on mobile phones. Many of us will have lost a card and only found out because something has gone out of the account. I pay tribute to my bank; I will not name it—it would, perhaps, be unfair for me, as Chair of the Treasury Committee, to pick one out just because of my own consumer moment—but it was very quick off the mark in realising that there had been some fraud. The payments were only very small amounts, but they were outside my normal pattern of purchases. The bank rang me and went through the security processes thoroughly to make sure that the card was stopped and I was reimbursed. The banks are doing a lot of work, but the challenge of increasing freedoms is that on the other side there is the risk of fraud, so thinking about how consumers will be protected is important.

Not long ago, the Treasury Committee published our report on access to cash. We held a very illuminating set of hearings. We highlighted in our report that, with fewer places accepting cash, certain groups, such as older people, those on lower incomes who use cash for budgeting, those with certain disabilities and those in domestic abuse situations, often have nowhere that they can buy things. Dame Siobhain, I think it was you who coined the phrase “the poverty premium”. Some big businesses, and others, will not accept cash. That means that the poorest, who budget with cash, have to travel further. Sometimes they will not be able to buy in their neighbourhood, have not really got the means to travel and have to pay the higher prices of the shops that will still take cash.

I should say that the Association of Convenience Stores is clear that it wants to see cash accepted, and many such stores do. As a point of principle, I sometimes go into the big supermarkets with cash and say, “Where can I queue?” There is often a longer queue for the machine that accepts cash, and it marks out those who only use cash. Mostly, they are not in my situation—I could pay with a card or a phone. They pay with cash because that is how they budget, and they do not want to risk spending more than they have got.

We know the challenges with paying in cash for electricity. There has been some progress in making sure that bills are equalised between those paying on a meter and in cash, but that has taken many years. I have been in this place for 20 years and, dare I say it, Dame Siobhain —it is hard to imagine—you have been here longer than me, and we know that that was a very big battle to fight.

One of the other things about getting consumer affairs right is that if consumers are supported, confident and protected, that hopefully means they have more confidence to buy. We saw the good news that consumer spending was up this July, but it has been a very challenging time for the economy. This Government inherited a really big set of challenges from the last Government, thanks to the Budget of September 2022. There were world events as well, but that dented consumer spending and raised mortgage rates, meaning that people have less money to spend.

I want to touch on the regulation of e-bikes, which is about protecting consumers. According to the London Fire Brigade, e-bikes are one of the major emerging causes of fires. One of my fire stations, in Shoreditch, has been holding what might be called amnesties. Delivery drivers will often buy an extra battery online in order to boost the range of their bike, because of course they make money on the number of deliveries that they make. They have been invited into the fire station to have them checked, and a number have been found to be dangerous. In particular for someone living in shared accommodation in London, if the battery in the bike in the hallway—which might be their livelihood—catches fire, it can be devastating. It can lead to loss of property and loss of life. It is really important that we give some thought to the regulation of e-bikes and batteries.

I have many issues with Lime bikes, which I will not go into now, but one of the things that legitimate e-bike providers, whether for sale or hire, would agree with me on—we do not agree on everything—is the need for proper regulation of e-bike batteries. We need to make sure that online sellers do not get away with selling dodgy batteries and that there are better checks in place. The Minister may not be able to give me a detailed answer right now—he has only been in the job three or four days, so I do not expect a full answer—but if he is not able to answer some of my points, it would be helpful if he could write to me. I have many constituents who are very concerned about these issues.

Utilities is a big area of concern. I have the privilege—I should state for the record that I am speaking with irony—of being a Thames Water customer, as are my constituents. We have seen the challenges there. I am sure the new Secretary of State will be as robust as the last in trying to tackle that. We have had a poor service, with burst water mains and our bills just going up all the time. That does not feel good for consumers. We need to make sure that the Government are given all power to their elbow in trying to tackle the water companies.

One thing that is very specific to the Minister’s Department is the licensing review. Again, that affects a lot of businesses in my area. It is partly about regulation, but it aims to equalise the price of licences at a lower level nationally. This is a very specific point, and I will be writing to the Minister or the Secretary of State on about it, but the London Local Authorities Act enables inner-London boroughs in particular—it affects them most—to charge a certain rate for licence fees for businesses. Hackney has the fastest-growing economy in London, according to the Office for National Statistics and the Greater London Authority, and many of its businesses require licensed premises. Equalising the rate at a lower level will reduce the council’s capacity to enforce licensed premises.

As it is now, licensees pay a fee, and they know that the bad licensed premises will also be inspected—there will be regular review points. That works well, because the good providers are very concerned that the bad providers should not get away with it. If the fee is equalised at a lower level, Hackney council stands to lose up to half a million pounds a year in fees, and will have no ability to carry out the enforcement work as proactively as it does.

We have a high density of licensed premises in Shoreditch and in Dalston, which I have had the privilege of representing since last year. Providers on those strips are very keen to have good enforcement. One licensee said to me, “Every morning I wake up and check my phone in case anything happened the night before,” because they know the responsibility of being a good licensee; it is really important to protect their customers, and also the sector as a whole, because people flock to my constituency to use these premises. If the council is unable to enforce on bad behaviour by licensees, that will damage the sector—and, I contend, damage the growth that is happening in Hackney.

Hackney South and Shoreditch is only half an hour away, so if the Minister or one of his team wanted to visit, or to bring officials in for an explanation from the council, I would very much welcome them. I hope that this issue will be considered. We certainly do not disagree with removing regulation or easing the path for businesses, but if we throw out the baby with the bathwater, we could end up with worse than we started with.

Insurance is another big issue for consumers. It seems incomprehensible to many people how much insurance premiums have gone up. Again, the Treasury Committee called in the insurance companies and raised some of the challenges with them. I will not go through that in detail—not least because most hon. Members in the Chamber were in the room when we had them in—but the costs for leaseholders seem to be going up, and there is a real issue about support for leaseholders, particularly in respect of transparency and accountability for service charges.

As I mentioned, I am a leaseholder myself. We get several long spreadsheets of information about how money is allocated, but it is very difficult to judge whether we are being charged a fair amount, whether that is for window cleaning, general cleaning or insurance. Obviously, since the tragedy of Grenfell, insurance for a block will be not just for the flat and the floor concerned, but for the whole building, and that has caused premiums to shoot up, but they have gone up by an incredible amount given the actual rate of tragic incidents—the reality has not matched the cost of the potential liability—so that is a big area of work.

That is also affecting consumer spending. Many of my constituents are first-time homeowners, who bought their dream homes as leaseholders. Some are shared owners, and they are in the worst of all worlds; they pay a mortgage on one portion and rent on the other, but they have responsibility for the whole thing, including all of the service charges and any remediation works that need to take place—I will leave cladding aside for a moment, but other works may need to take place—and then they are trapped, because the service charge and mortgage have gone up, and sometimes their rent has too, and they are unable to sell. Many are very much trapped in that situation.

On consumer affairs, I must of course mention the issue of cladding. Many of my constituents are still waiting for the first bit of work to be done; all they have had is a slight investigation to determine that the cladding needs to be removed. Sometimes it is only a small amount, but because of the risk-based approach, those with the least cladding are sometimes at the back of the queue. In many cases, scaffolding has not even gone up. We are in 2025. The tragedy of Grenfell happened in 2017, and by 2018 it was very clear what the problems were: a failure of regulation over many generations, which has led to a real problem. That is one of the biggest consumer scandals of a generation.

I know that it is not in the Minister’s Department, but we now have the Building Safety Regulator. My constituents and I are impatient for work to happen as fast as possible. We need to step up not just the number of skilled people to do the work, but—the trade deals done by the Minister’s Department may help with this—the supply chains, so that the necessary materials are available alongside the skills. There is so much more that I could say on this—I have repeated it endlessly in the House—but people are trapped. They have lost faith in the housing system. They feel, quite rightly and understandably, that they were sold the dream and bought a home in good faith, and now they are living the nightmare and trapped. Often, they want to move to a bigger property but are unable to do so because they cannot sell theirs. There is an awful lot to be done there.

More widely, there are options with regulation: we can have regulation that is very heavy-handed and protects people but can be a burden on businesses, but we can also have self-management. We saw that the regulation of building safety went way too far in one direction. Regulations were removed incrementally, so that no one knew who was responsible for certain things and proper checks were not done. We need to get the balance right. Self-regulation can work very well, but there needs to be a robust and, in a way, fearsome regime to make sure that it is audited. There is no point in saying to a sector, “Self-regulate,” if that is not double-checked and triple-checked at some point, so that the sector knows that the heavy hand of the regulator, whoever it may be, can come down heavily on it. If the Government are moving away from regulation—as we are certainly seeing in financial services—or trying to loosen it a bit, we need to make sure that we watch very closely, protect the consumer along the way, and get key assurances in place.

This is an important debate, and there is so much more that I could talk about. I started with Mars bars and ended with building safety, which shows the gamut of important issues that matter to consumers. We need to make sure that they are protected from the worst harm while innovation in things like fintech can give people more choice—that is also important.