15 Apr 2011

Better Choices, Better Deals: New Strategy to Empower Consumers

A radical new approach to give more power to consumers in their relationships with business, was announced today.

A radical new approach to give more power to consumers in their relationships with business, was announced today.

Under the plans announced by Edward Davey businesses will provide key information to their customers on how they use and buy goods and services. This will help people get the best deal possible, and make business more dynamic in response.

The new approach is published in Better Choices, Better Deals: Consumers Powering Growth and marks a shift away from legislating to make change happen. Instead it announces new ways to help consumers help themselves and challenges business to innovate, which in turn will drive growth in the economy.

The Government is on a relentless drive to support economic growth and rebalance the economy. The Plan for Growth, published last month, is a mixture of practical actions, investment and longer term work to remove barriers, stimulate growth and secure the UK's position at the forefront of innovation.

Part of the initiative published today will be a project called mydata, which will assess how to give people their personal data in a format that is safe to pass onto third parties, such as price comparison sites. If an application or website can pick out the one perfect deal based on your user information, this will help to make consumer choices simpler.

For example, there are 12.7 million different phone deals to choose from, and a recent survey from Billmonitor shows that the average mobile phone user overspends by £200 a year. Using the personal data a phone company holds, such as whether a customer uses all their minutes or exceed their internet allowance, could help consumers to find a better deal.

Consumers will also be able to work with businesses and other organisations on a larger scale:

The Government expects regulators, Departments and public service providers to release more information about complaints and performance data and will launch a competition to support new ways of using this data;

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will work with Community Organisers to encourage collective purchasing deals and launch an Innovation Prize with Co-operatives UK to reward innovative new ideas on collective purchasing, with a fund of up to £30,000 to award in grants;

The Behavioural Insights Team will pilot a green collective purchasing scheme with B&Q;

BIS will support the development of a self-regulatory quality mark for web and comparison sites; and

There will be a new resolution scheme for e-commerce disputes.

The Government also wants to ensure everyone has access to better choices, and is asking for a review by Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland, with Consumer Focus, into how to empower the most vulnerable.

The report Better Choices: Better Deals from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) can be found here.

The public are invited to leave feedback to BIS and BIT on the strategy here.

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