Contribution
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 9, which seeks to strengthen the consumer protection provisions at the heart of the Bill. This amendment would insert two paragraphs into Clause 1. We believe that both are desirable and necessary if this legislation is to deliver meaningful change for the travelling public. The first would add the requirement for
“standardised, comparable information at the point of sale”.
Anyone who has purchased an airline ticket recently will be familiar with the booking experience. I will not go through all the painful detail but suffice to say that, by the time you come to the payment page, the fee you are charged bears little resemblance to the one that first encouraged you to make the booking.
That is not an accident; it is intentional. It is a business model that has moved, frankly, from the sublime to the ridiculous. For example, at the moment, the CMA is investigating Ryanair’s mandatory charge of £8 each way for the privilege of sitting with your own children. It is a business model that harms consumers, distorts competition and corrodes trust in the aviation sector. Airlines that compete fairly on total price are undercut by those which strip out every possible cost, just to put them back in. We do not tolerate these practices in other markets—imagine for one moment that the same situation was in place when you were doing your online grocery shopping. It means that consumers cannot make rational or informed choices. Again, that is the intention. Families on modest budgets find themselves paying significantly more than they had intended to.
My amendment would address this directly by requiring airlines and all ticket sellers—I emphasise all ticket sellers, whether the airlines themselves, online travel agents or price comparison websites—to display the total price up front, including all fees, taxes and unavoidable charges. We believe this is not a radical proposition. It is not difficult for the airlines, if they are selling direct to consumers, or their agents to comply with. Most consumers reasonably believe that this is the case already, so this amendment aims to make it so.
The second element of the amendment concerns passenger rights. When a flight is delayed or cancelled, or a passenger is denied boarding, they are entitled to certain protections, and rightly so. But the evidence consistently shows that a significant portion of affected passengers do not know what those rights are and that airlines do not always volunteer that information. My amendment would require this information about passenger rights in disruption scenarios to be provided clearly at the point of sale, not buried deep in terms and conditions in the small print, and accessible only to those who know how to look for it.
Thirdly, the information element concerns environmental impact. Consumers are increasingly seeking to make informed choices consistent with their values. Aviation, as we know, is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. While the sector as a whole must decarbonise, individuals, too, wish to understand the environmental impact of their individual journeys. Standardised carbon footprint information at the point of sale would enable informed choices. It would also in time, we hope, drive competition on environmental performance, an outcome that we argue would drive consumer-led carbon-reduction measures.
The second part of the amendment includes mandatory minimum compensation standards and, critically, automated payment mechanisms for flight delays, cancellations and denied boarding. The right to compensation for significant disruption already exists in law. Yet, year after year, consumer bodies and passengers find that it is not happening. They are waiting long times and often having to go to court and take legal action. That is an unacceptable situation.
The solution that I have proposed is an automation system to make sure that, where delays happen, there is an automatic payment so that you do not have to go through a complicated process to do it. The airlines have all this information. They know who is on their planes, they know who is not, they know when they are delayed and they know when compensation needs to be paid. We do not believe that this requirement would be too onerous on the airlines. It would simply make it a more efficient, fair and effective system.
We welcome this Bill. We recognise the consumer protections, but we feel that they need to have real bite. That is what my amendments seek to do. Our worry is that, if we do not put stronger protections in the Bill, we will simply have gestures towards consumer rights without actually putting them in statute. With the inclusion of these amendments, we would take concrete steps to make sure that we are acting in the passengers’ best interests in making these systems fairer and more efficient.