Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee
Oral evidence: Consumer protection, HC 130
Tuesday 3 November 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 November 2026.
Members present: Liam Byrne (Chair); Dan Aldridge; Antonia Bance; Sarah Edwards; Mr Joshua Reynolds.
Questions 220 - 248
II
Witnesses: Sue Davies and David MacKenzie.
Chair: Welcome to the second panel of today’s Committee hearings on consumer safety where we look at some of the issues around black Friday sales.
Before we start, I want to put on record the Committee’s deep concern that three of the organisations that we invited today declined to appear. Amazon, John Lewis and TikTok are three of the companies about which we have heard the most complaints regarding the misuse of black Friday marketing. Their failure to attend reflects very badly on their willingness to engage with Parliament. It hampers us from ensuring that consumer protections are fit for purpose. More importantly, it casts doubt on their commitment to protect the customers from whom they profit.
I want to make absolutely clear that the refusals by these companies will only delay their appearance. As a Committee, we remain absolutely committed to hearing from them, and I am sending a very clear message today that, if necessary, we will use all the parliamentary powers at our disposal to ensure that the hearing takes place.
We have other examples. You have a toaster on Amazon being advertised for £21.87, reduced from £29.99, that just 60 days before black Friday had been £20, less than the black Friday deal that was on offer. In another Amazon black Friday deal, a TV was £318 and it apparently had an RRP of £449, but it had not been sold at £449 on Amazon for the 12 months prior. What are some of the worst examples you have seen?
Sue Davies: Your findings fit with what we have been seeing over the years with black Friday. People think that black Friday means they are going to be getting special deals, but when we monitored it last year and looked at 175 deals across eight retailers, we found that in 83% of cases people could find that product either cheaper or at the same price at other times of the year.
Sue Davies: Yes, that is right. They were cheaper at that point, so you might think it is a special deal because it is black Friday, but we have told people to be really cautious of the deals and to carefully watch the prices. We monitored for six months before last year and six months afterwards, when we published our findings.
Sue Davies: It shows a more general problem with pricing practices. Over the last couple of years, we have really stepped up our monitoring of pricing practices over black Friday and more generally. We have found lots of problems with misleading offers, where you think you are getting a really good bargain.
You see a “was” price. They say, “This was £399; it is now £299”, as Joshua was saying. It can often be very misleading because that price might have been a price for a much shorter period than the reduced price, and there may have been many intervening prices that were cheaper.
We have also found a lot of problems with use of recommended retail prices. Sports Direct is a particular problem there. We see the advertised price, and the guidance from the ASA is that the recommended retail price should be the usual price that you see across retailers, but we have struggled to find it at that higher price that it is being advertised at, so they are again suggesting that you are getting a much better deal than would be the case. We think there are real problems with reference pricing and fake discounts for people over black Friday and more generally.
We have found issues with loyalty pricing as well, where you can see a non-loyalty price being raised to suggest a better price when you are using your loyalty card than is the case.
Chair: Let us just stay on black Friday prices for a minute. I might come back to loyalty prices.
Sue Davies: No, it should not be allowed. This points to a wider problem about enforcing the laws in relation to misleading pricing. We keep doing our own monitoring. We will go to the companies. We will try to get them to change their misleading practices, but it is very difficult to get action taken against some of these companies. We feel that there is not an adequate deterrent.
Sue Davies: There are many issues. One of the problems in terms of reference pricing is that it can be more challenging to take action against a company because you have to prove that it was a misleading action and therefore that it would have misled the average consumer’s transactional decision. There is more of a legal hurdle.
Sue Davies: Yes. From the monitoring that we do, we find lots of misleading pricing. It points to a real problem of enforcement. We are starting to see the CMA taking action on some pricing practices but not misleading reference pricing in the way that we think it should.
A lot of this work should be being policed by trading standards, and I am sure David will be able to expand on that. We have seen a complete decimation of trading standards across the board. We did a big Freedom of Information Act request a couple of years ago to get a real understanding of what the resources were within local authority trading standards services.
In the worst-case scenarios, there is one person enforcing about 300 pieces of legislation. We think this means that people are going to be losing money or buying things that they do not need to buy, because they think that they are getting a deal that they are not, but the enforcement system is not able to tackle them in the way they need to.
Sue Davies: Yes. Currys and Very are ones that we have found lots of issues with, which we have highlighted.
Sue Davies: They continue because they are able to get away with it. There are two issues. The law is—
Mr Reynolds: John Lewis is one of the most trusted retailers across this country.
Sue Davies: In some sectors, it has become so commonplace in the way that fake deals are used to suggest a better price. There needs to be a real clampdown on it. As I said, that requires a tightening of the law. We were pleased to see that the Government are looking at updating the banned practices list. There is an unnecessary legal hurdle to taking action against what to us seems like straightforward misleading pricing.
It needs to be as straightforward as possible to take action against these misleading prices, and businesses need to know that action will be taken if they break the law. We also need to have the resources to make sure that there are these checks on compliance and that businesses know that, if they do not comply, they will be prosecuted. At the moment, trading standards is covering so many things, from illegal vapes to rogue builders, that misleading pricing does not seem to be getting the attention that it needs.
What makes me more concerned—Sue, you might have something to say about this—is that, in essence, nobody should be buying anything on black Friday because there are no real deals here. Is that essentially what we are looking at?
Sue Davies: There are some deals, but you could get that deal, in most cases, by waiting and getting it after black Friday, and it may have been the same price before black Friday as well. You need to look at the prices, and not be tempted and think, “I have to get this because it is only going to be available on black Friday.”
Sue Davies: It certainly highlights the way that misleading pricing has been allowed to become ubiquitous in many cases. We always give people advice to be really careful and think about whether it is the deal that it looks like it is. We have already started to do our monitoring of deals. Although black Friday is 27 November, it is expanding over an increasingly long period. You can see a lot of supposed deals already being advertised now.
We always tell people to be careful about the scam advertising that you see around black Friday. We think that is another area where people are often targeted and see big discounts. We want Ofcom to clamp down on some of this scam advertising that you see on social media platforms.
Sue Davies: Yes, definitely. These are big moments when people are thinking that they will get a deal. From the research that we had been doing, a couple of years ago we decided to step up our monitoring of pricing practices. We thought there might be some issues, but we needed more evidence to see what the problem was. Nearly everywhere we have looked, we have found examples of misleading pricing.
A lot of that is the issues with reference pricing and recommended retail prices. We also found a lot of issues with drip pricing. That is continuing as well. You see a price but, as you click through, extra costs get added. The law has been tightened up to deal with drip pricing and we are starting to see some enforcement action, but we feel that misleading pricing is an area where the law has not been updated. It is more difficult to take action against that sort of pricing. We are not seeing action against companies in the way that we think is needed.
Sue Davies: When we look at black Friday, we see this across the board. Last year, we looked at eight different retailers, and we found a wide range of issues across them. You could often get the deals for the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.
Sports Direct is one where we feel it is repeatedly using misleading pricing. One example would be Jack Wills. You can see the price being advertised at £24 and you are told that you are getting a saving because it was supposedly £54.99, but the same company now owns Jack Wills and we really struggle to find that higher price anywhere. That happens quite a lot with Sports Direct in the way it is using pricing.
With Very and Currys, there are lots of deals where we have looked at the “was” price and found that it was a price that was used at one point, but after that there have been several lower prices before the price that the consumer is being offered. We have gone to them with that and asked them to sort out their pricing, but there needs to be a much stronger deterrent in terms of updating the law to make it easier to take action against these prices.
I wanted to ask both of you about online scams, the extent to which you think consumers are at a greater risk of online scams on black Friday, and on which platforms those risks are appearing. David, would you like to start?
David MacKenzie: First of all, I absolutely share the Committee’s concern on this issue. I agree that this is a significant issue and it is not being tackled as well as it could be. As Sue has said, there is a lack of enforcement—I will quite openly talk about that, and I am happy to be honest about that and explain why that is—but we need some changes in the law as well.
It was interesting to hear you talking about black Friday. The whole idea of black Friday is that it is one day and you get super special deals on one day. That is why it is a Friday. As you were saying there, it has been extended to a week. I saw a couple of adverts for black November a few weeks ago. It is almost like a joke that is not a joke. It is meaningless, as far as we are concerned, given the way that this conversation has gone.
On the question that you were asking, it is the things that Sue was talking about. It is particularly “was/now”, as Committee members have raised. That is the biggest one.
Recommended retail prices have not gone away, though. They are still there. That is one of the areas where we could look at tightening up the law. From our perspective, what purpose does a recommended retail price have in 2026 or 2027? None—I cannot think of a legitimate use for it. It might be that banning it completely is a sensible way forward. There are some things like that that could be done to improve the situation.
Certainly, on black Friday it is mostly about pricing. You are asking about what the particular issues are. There are other broader issues of fraudulent activity and scammers picking up on the latest AI techniques to create fake reviews, fake influencer endorsements and all this kind of stuff. That interacts with these pricing things.
This is such a significant issue because, while the scammers do it because they do all the scam things, this behaviour is also, as we have said, across the broader marketplace, with some of the “was/now” stuff and recommended retail prices.
Another one would be things like countdown clocks. It can also be the other way around with an after-sales price: “You’d better buy it now because it’s going up in price next week,” but then it does not go up in price next week. I absolutely share the Committee’s concerns about this.
There are two important pieces of context, though. First, as Sue said, this is fighting against all the other things that we have to do with a handful of people. I know people like me always say this, but it is true. It is fireworks season. There are a lot of jobs for us to do in terms of that. It was about Halloween costumes last week. I do not know whether you saw some of the press around that. We were finding lots of dangerous—
David MacKenzie: Yes and no. We have what are called primary authority partnerships. The idea is that one local authority—traditionally, it is the local authority where the head office for the company is, but it does not have to be—takes on lead responsibility for advising that company on how to ensure its activities comply across the country.
Supermarkets have it, for example. It works very well in that situation because it saves there being lots of inspections at lots of individual supermarkets across the country. You get the point there.
With online it is slightly different, given the marketplace that we have, but it still can work well. Ultimately, the primary authorities and what we call the enforcing authorities, which are the authorities that are investigating something or taking it forward, are small organisations compared with these massive multinationals. There is an imbalance there. There is no doubt about that.
Sue Davies: This is another issue of enforcement. Which? campaigned hard for online advertising scams to be included within the Online Safety Act. We now need Ofcom to enforce that because we repeatedly see problems across social media platforms. We were really encouraged to see that in August the Government said that they were going to look at the consumer landscape as a whole—the enforcement regime as well as ADR schemes and redress.
Sue Davies: No. They have just said that they will look at it. This is such a long-standing issue that we just feel the system that we have at the moment is not fit for purpose to deal with the sorts of—
Sue Davies: There was a review of duties that the Secretary of State wrote to you about. We think that there now needs to be a more fundamental look at how enforcement works and at how we make sure that we have the right expertise, resources and skills at the right level.
It is unsustainable that one of the biggest companies in the whole world is overseen by Hertfordshire trading standards. Hertfordshire trading standards is one of the better-resourced trading standards teams, but we feel that it would be better dealt with by national regulators.
Trading standards departments need to have sufficient resources at a local level to tackle issues within their communities or the businesses that are in those areas and make sure that, across the breadth of issues that they are responsible for, not only misleading pricing, but a whole range of other issues, including product safety, food standards—except in Scotland—and rogue traders, they are able to do that.
Sue, what advice do you have about the other types of pricing practices that are going on, whether that is on Amazon, John Lewis or TikTok, none of which have turned up today, that my constituents and others across the country need to be aware of before they make purchases?
Sue Davies: They need to look at them really carefully. It is very difficult as a consumer. That is why you need to rely on effective enforcement. Ideally, the companies would be doing the responsible thing and using promotions that are genuine in the first place.
As Which?, we are able to look at a whole range of pricing data when we monitor pricing over several months. We can see that there are these fake discounts that are being advertised. As a consumer, when you are looking at these advertised prices, it can be very difficult to work out what is genuine or not, particularly when, as David was saying, they are using countdown timers or other pressure techniques to make you think, “I’d better buy this because I might not be able to get this offer again.”
In many cases, as I have said, you can still get those deals after black Friday. You can be cautious as a consumer and think about whether it really is the deal that it should be, but it is very difficult. That is why you need to have the tightening of the law and more effective enforcement.
David MacKenzie: There has been a good start. The CMA has taken action against a number of companies, with something like £12 million in fines and a couple of million in refunds for consumers so far. That is really good. There are some really significant things there. It is actually some of the things we have been talking about.
David MacKenzie: It is a good start.
Chair: It is a start, I would suggest.
David MacKenzie: It is a start, yes, but it needs to be continued. Trading standards needs to come into this and do the more local stuff, as Sue has been saying.
We have to go through a court process under the DMCC. We do not have the direct enforcement model that the CMA has. Inevitably, the process is longer. None of those cases has come to court yet, but they are being investigated and moving on. It is challenging because we have to find time for that with all the other stuff that we all know that we do, but we are determined to do it. There are always extra tweaks or powers that we could have to assist that.
David MacKenzie: Yes. Those of us who are involved in enforcement should not be aiming for the low-hanging fruit. We need to aim at the areas of real detriment. That is what we say all the time, and we need to act on that.
David MacKenzie: If they are involved in significant consumer detriment, yes, absolutely. It may well be some of them, but it is also other areas. We have to be ruthless in putting our resources into the areas of higher detriment. That is what we need to do. We need to be effective in this particular topic area, which, as I have been quite open about, so far we have not been.
David MacKenzie: This goes across the board wherever a big operator is operating a marketplace. It includes TikTok Shop and other social media platforms. It is not just the traditional operators—Amazon, eBay or whatever; it is all these enormous platforms and the sales that they facilitate.
A lot of the issues we have been talking about and others are operating on these marketplaces. One thing that we are very clear about is that they should be doing more to utilise AI. These are tech giants. You are not telling me that they cannot make clever use of AI to prevent these things happening. That has to be a big part of this.
Sue, starting with you, how concerned should we be over this pay-by-bank trend? Is it something that we should be concerned about?
Sue Davies: We are concerned, exactly as you say, that people do not have the same protections as if they were using a credit card or a debit card. When we did a survey recently, we found that one in eight people did not realise that they did not have the same protections.
As this is now being rolled out more widely—for people to pay when shopping at retailers or booking flights, for example—we are concerned that people could potentially lose large amounts of money. If one of the companies went bust, for example, they would not be able to get their money back.
We have told people to be really careful when they are using pay-by-bank, but we think it is a good example of how we need to look at payment protections more generally and make sure that there is a baseline level of protection that is appropriate so that people are protected and can get their money back when something goes wrong.
Sue Davies: We are looking at what the right level of protection is. The Government are looking more generally at payments and payment protections, but there needs to be a baseline level of protection. It may not be exactly the same, but we need to make sure that we have the right level of protection. We want to understand what is appropriate. We are going to be engaging with the Government and talking to them about how that should be done.
David MacKenzie: Again, I would endorse what Sue has said. There are some situations where there is some coverage. If it is a fraud, an authorised push payment fraud or something like that, there are other mechanisms by which the banks have obligations to refund people. As Sue says, if the company goes bust, if the goods are faulty or if there is another breach of contract—to be honest, these are much more common situations than all-out frauds—people are not covered. What really is the difference, in this day and age, between using a debit card where you are covered by chargeback, albeit it is a voluntary scheme, and the pay-by-bank option?
The other thing to add very quickly is that the whole section 75 thing has not kept up to date. For example, people can pay for things on PayPal using a credit card. People blithely do that and think they are being clever because they think they are covering themselves but, because they have introduced an extra party into the payment system, it is not covered.
There is also a big debate over whether, for example, Amazon Marketplace sales are covered. As I understand it, the banks quite often take the position that they are not covered, although the financial ombudsman has held a different position. That needs clarifying. Some work needs to be done on that.
Chair: We are just going to do a quick wrap-up question on fireworks. We have heard some extraordinary evidence about how it is impossible to control fireworks because we will just have a bigger black market.
David MacKenzie: When you make things more difficult or you ban them outright, it is almost a logical certainty that it will increase the black market in some way. What is very difficult to be clear about here is the scale.
There is one piece of evidence that I could throw to you on this. North of the border, where I am from, the Scottish Government have gone further on fireworks restrictions. For example, they have used devolved legislation to restrict the times of day and the quantity of fireworks that can be sold. What that has done is to reduce the number of retailers of fireworks in Scotland significantly over a period of years, but I am not aware of much in the way of evidence that the illicit supply has mushroomed in that time.
Indeed, a lot of the concerns about fireworks are about antisocial behaviour, are they not? They are about gangs of whoever firing them at each other or at the police, the fire brigade and all that kind of thing.
David MacKenzie: With most of the stuff about fireworks that trading standards is involved in, compliance is pretty high. The legitimate fireworks industry is pretty good at safe storage, not selling to kids and all that kind of stuff. The compliance is pretty good on that stuff. You are right—it is the antisocial behaviour that is the real issue.
Chair: That has given us a lot to put to Ministers in particular about what their plans might be to crystallise some kind of formal consultation that leads to something. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence today. That concludes this panel.