Consumer protection initiatives in the UK

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文- Consumer protection initiatives in the UK，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了英国消费者权益保护的举措。2011年，英国政府颁布了新的《消费者权益保护法》，其不仅简化了繁琐的法律法规体系，整合了内容交叉、重叠的法规，并且以明确的质量标准来替代旧法的隐含条款。产品质量及责任方面，新法要求明确产品的质量标准和违约补偿责任。

Strengthening the protection of consumers' rights and interests is an important way to stimulate and expand consumption. In response to the persistently weak economy, boosting consumer confidence and giving play to the positive role of consumer demand in economic recovery, the British government has launched a new round of consumer protection action plan since 2011. Some measures have been implemented and others will be completed in 2014. This round of action of the United Kingdom attracted the attention and reference of the United States and other countries in the European Union. In China, online shopping, finance, tourism, express in the areas of infringement events in recent years, showing high incidence trend, such as happened last year "commercial war", "credit card payment in full hidden rules", "sanya rip off event", severely dampened consumer confidence, so to increase the protection of consumer rights and interests is imminent.

In September 2011, the British government promulgated the new law on the protection of the rights and interests of consumers. Compared with the old law, the biggest changes of the new law are reflected in two aspects. First, it simplifies the cumbersome legal system and integrates the overlapping laws and regulations. This move solves the problem of unclear responsibility and buck-passing in the protection of consumers' rights and interests. Second, explicit quality standards to replace the implicit provisions of the old law. In terms of product quality and liability, the new law requires clear product quality standards and liability for breach of contract compensation. If the product fails to meet the standard within 30 days of purchase, the consumer can request a full refund. In particular, information products are emphasized, requiring that product quality be consistent with description and meet consumer expectations. If the consumer does not use or install, the consumer is entitled to a full refund within 14 days of purchase. In terms of services, the new law requires consumers to start providing the services they buy within 30 days and to meet contractual standards, including service hours and prices. If the required standards are not met, the merchant must re-provide the entire service or incomplete part of the service free of charge.

With the development of science and technology, businesses can through own grasp consumer information to analyze consumer demand and consumption, and then adopt corresponding marketing strategies, however, consumer is difficult to use to buy the product in the past relevant information to help them to make new purchase options, so that lead to consumers at a disadvantage position. In order to gradually reverse the disadvantage of consumers, the British government implemented a voluntary program named Midata in 2012. The program will be mandatory for the next few years.

Midata programme to encourage the operator will have the consumption of information in a unified electronic format safely sent to individual consumers, asked the electronic data can be further processed, easy to carry, the content including buying product, time, price, tax, payment, address, contact information, etc., so that consumers use these data to understand their consumer behavior, when buying products and services can make a more sensible choice. At present, although the project is only targeted at enterprises with consumer electronic data, mainly involving the energy, telecommunications and financial sectors, it will be expanded in the future.

To make it easier for consumers to get information and help, and to prosecute offending companies more efficiently, the government has launched a radical overhaul of the regulator, which should be completed by 2014.

In order to strengthen the supervision of enterprises, the competition and market authority was established, which has changed the problems of slow response, low efficiency and overlapping responsibilities caused by the joint supervision of the fair trade office, the trade commission and the competition appeal court. By 2014, the government will have abolished the trade commission and the office of fair trade and moved its functions to the competition and markets authority.

In order to further integrate into the eu and actively promote the protection of consumers' rights and interests throughout the eu, the British government is about to introduce the eu's latest consumer protection law. By June 2014, the law will be an important part of the UK consumer protection act. The law in 2011, passed unanimously in the eu member states, its typical characteristics is outside the existing remote sales and shop sales of modification and combined, the relevant laws and regulations of guarantee when trading cancelled or transaction has been completed, achieve a responsibility balance between consumers and businesses, reduce the cost of businesses to solve disputes and to the greatest extent of damage to consumers.

According to the law, merchants should fully inform consumers of complete and true information before selling products, and should not charge excessive extra fees in the sales process. Instead of being sold in-store, consumers receive a 14-day "cooling-off period" through online sales and door-to-door sales, meaning they have the right to return goods and receive a full refund.

At present, China is implementing the strategy of expanding domestic demand, but it mainly relies on policy promotion, and the market-oriented growth mechanism of consumer demand has not yet been established. Although the reasons are complex, the poor protection of consumers' rights and interests cannot be ignored.

First, the protection of consumers' rights and interests is scattered in many laws and regulations, such as the product quality law, the national standard management measures, the food safety law, the drug administration law, the metering law and the price law, which are difficult for ordinary consumers to grasp and understand. Secondly, as the most important law to protect the rights and interests of consumers, it is also the main basis for consumers to claim their rights and interests. The current law on the protection of consumers' rights and interests only lists nine basic rights of consumers, and the scope of rights is too narrow. Finally, lagging laws and regulations and insufficient involvement in emerging consumption fields, such as Internet shopping, finance and insurance consumption, medical care, express delivery, tourism and other fields, lead to frequent damage to consumers' rights and interests.

When consumers' rights and interests are damaged, it is a key issue whether the channels for safeguarding rights and interests are unblocked. "Consumer rights and interests protects a law" although stipulate by 5 kinds of way to the consumers' rights, but not a specific operation method and the instruction, prompted a consultation in discord, mediation practice often difficult to be clear, the protracted, arbitration is not well-founded, Sue exhausted, seriously affected the consumers' rights and interests maintenance, in the long term dampened consumer confidence, has a serious impact on consumer spending behavior.

In addition, under the current system, consumer association is an important institution for the protection of consumers' rights and interests. However, because it is only a community organization without any administrative or compulsory functions, it can only rely on mediation to solve disputes, and its role in the protection of consumers' rights and interests is limited.

The high cost of safeguarding rights has become an unbearable pain for consumers. When product quality disputes occur, consumers have to seek third-party testing institutions for testing. Most ordinary consumers are put off by the lack of relevant professional testing institutions, tedious testing procedures and high testing costs. In addition, rights protection also needs a lot of time and energy.

What is asymmetric with the high cost of rights protection is that the low proportion of compensation aggravates the damage to consumers' rights and interests caused by operators. According to article 49 of the law on the protection of the rights and interests of consumers, the compensation amount is twice the original cost of the product or service, and even the food safety law applicable to food is only 10 times the compensation. However, in reality, most of the disputes in the rights and interests of consumers are small disputes, and the low proportion of compensation often leads to consumers' loss rather than gain, "winning the lawsuit and losing money".

In China, the lack of consumer knowledge has not changed significantly with the continuous enrichment of products. The lack of consumer knowledge seriously restricts the ability of consumers to identify fake and inferior products and increases the probability of disputes. Most consumers lack product knowledge, and have limited ability to identify product quality and authenticity. In addition, weak awareness of rights protection is an important reason why consumers' rights are often damaged. The consciousness of right protection makes the personal interests can not be protected, and also encourages the infringement of operators. For example, many Chinese consumers, especially rural consumers, do not have the habit of asking for invoices, or think that the amount of small did not ask for notes. Once the quality problem occurs, the claim will be unfounded.

First, we will expand the scope of consumer rights. Further expand the nine basic rights stipulated in the consumer law, specify the provisions on recall of defective goods, active disclosure of commodity or service information by operators, consumer's right of privacy, consumption choice and dignity, and increase the rights of spiritual claim, regret and transaction voucher. Second, expand the coverage of laws and regulations. On the basis of the coverage of existing laws and regulations, we will further expand the coverage of various material and spiritual goods to cover emerging consumption areas such as online shopping, medical care, financial insurance, communications and media, so as to fill the gaps in existing laws and regulations. Third, we will increase punitive damages and compensation for mental damages to deter operators from infringing on consumers' rights and interests. Drawing on the provisions of the food safety law of the People's Republic of China on "one loss for ten", the punitive compensation for small amounts shall be increased to ten times and that for large amounts shall be increased to more than twenty times.

First, the establishment of small litigation system. We should learn from the experience of small litigation in Britain and France, establish a system of small litigation, establish standards for small disputes, and set up small litigation courts to solve disputes quickly and effectively and improve the enthusiasm of safeguarding rights. The second is to endow the consumer association with the qualification of public interest litigation and give full play to the role of consumer association in group rights litigation. Third, clarify the burden of proof and costs, reduce litigation costs and testing costs, litigation costs in the issue of tilt to consumers.

First, we will raise the threshold for entry into the industry, improve the mechanism for access to goods and services, especially the food and drug market, and reduce the root causes that infringe on consumers' rights and interests. Second, we will strengthen industrial supervision and regulation, strictly control both production and consumption, and crack down on violations of consumers' rights and interests. Third, improve the level of self-discipline of business operators, guide business operators to establish the concept of responsibility to protect the rights and interests of consumers, give encouragement and support to responsible enterprises, gradually promote the legal system of enterprises to maintain consumer responsibility, and improve the supervision mechanism of business responsibility.

First, the education department should establish a standardized education system of consumption knowledge, including consumption knowledge education into the primary, secondary and advanced education courses, and encourage students to actively participate in social consumer rights activities. The second is to strengthen the role of media in consumer knowledge education. News media should be guided to expose illegal behaviors of operators that infringe on consumers' rights and interests, expose various "hidden rules" of the industry, and improve ordinary consumers' awareness of daily counterfeit and shoddy products. The third is to expand the influence of consumer associations in the process of safeguarding their rights. Strengthen the publicity of March 15 consumer rights and interests day, increase the frequency and intensity of "fighting against counterfeits", cooperate with the administrative departments to strengthen the publicity of rights protection information, and actively mediate consumer disputes.

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