Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The items in this section are all consumer items, as Senator Cullinane said. It deals with the billing, payments, information, complaints, codes of practice and so forth. I sought to involve the National Consumer Agency, but that is not acceptable to the Minister of State. We are not sure of the position with freedom of information.

I was struck by Senator Keane's remark about writing something in the legislation. There is a wish in the House to have better consumer protection than is in these codes of practice. The Minister of State said we could take it up with the committee, but this body is superior to the committee and we have made no progress in finding out the price of water or the general free allowance. What is the point in telling a House of the Parliament to bring the matter to a committee? This is the decision making body and I seek much better protection for the consumer than is provided here. I want checks and balances, not a larger PR department of the type we already have in the energy sector. Throughout the north midlands people regard consultation with the electricity industry as a waste of time. It has a view on pylons and it is not listening to anybody. The Government promised to unite the National Consumer Agency and the Competition Authority but it is more than half way through its term and it has not done it.

The consumer is not well served by this section. This reminds me of the era before free legal aid when one said, "We will ask the gardaí to be a bit nicer to him because he has no money". People need rights, not larger PR and bits of concessions here and there. This will be a very powerful body and I do not believe it is controlled. Some of the reasonable suggestions from this side of the House have not been accepted by the Minister but the codes of practice proposed in section 25 do not protect the consumer. The precedents in energy, health insurance and bus transport all indicate how this will proceed. I read out to the Minister of State what people have written in the literature on regulatory capture. We must protect consumers. There were two examples from the Minister of State's Department only an hour ago in the House. HomeBond proved to be useless and the construction industry proved to be useless. I give the Department the benefit of the doubt because it thought consumers would be protected in the pyrite case. However, when it looked at it, they were not protected. I wish to ensure it is written in the legislation that the consumers of water will be protected, not just assume it will be done in a committee or that something would not happen. Only this evening we dealt with examples of where, by not putting something in legislation, the rights of people who lived in pyrite houses and the builders who bought material from those quarries proved to be unenforceable.

We must take a stronger consumer line. For that reason, I oppose these codes of practice. They are not radical enough or sufficiently protective of the customer.