In his first King’s Speech, on 7 November, King Charles explained the Government’s priorities for the next 12 months. He emphasised that the Government’s focus is on increasing economic growth, bringing down inflation, and helping businesses fund new jobs and investment.
As part of his speech the King outlined a number of planned laws that you may be particularly interested in as a business owner, and we’ve briefly summarised these below.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill
This bill aims to tackle consumer rip-offs, including fake reviews and subscription traps. It also aims to prevent anticompetitive behaviour and boost innovation.
Key parts of the bill include:
- making it harder for traders to trap people into subscription contracts they no longer want;
- introducing new powers for the CMA to more easily tackle bad business practices such as fake reviews and drip pricing (where businesses advertise part of a product’s price upfront and reveal other charges later in the purchase process);
- allowing the CMA to deal with anticompetitive activity quickly and effectively; and
- enabling the CMA to designate a small number of the most powerful tech companies and ensure they comply with certain rules and obligations, to deter anticompetitive conduct.
The Government expects the bill to deliver a benefit of £9.7 billion over 10 years, as well as to save UK consumers time, stress and money. It aims to help smaller businesses be better able to compete with larger businesses and support innovation across the economy.
What should you do now?
The bill is currently going through Parliament, and is subject to change and consultation, so you aren’t legally required to do anything yet. However, if you engage in practices like automatic renewals/long rollover periods for subscriptions, or you think you might be using drip pricing, you should be aware that these types of practices may be targeted under the new laws.
We’ll keep you informed as the bill progresses through Parliament so that you can ensure your business is following the correct rules. In the meantime, you can use our free Quick guide to customer rights in online sales to check you’re following the law when selling online.
The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill
The Government is aiming to create a new, flexible data protection regime in order to boost the economy and promote innovation, while protecting people from harm. This bill is aimed at taking advantage of post-Brexit freedoms to reduce burdens on businesses (particularly SMEs) as compared with the GDPR regime.
Key aspects of this bill include:
- allowing businesses to protect personal data in more practical and proportionate ways, with the aim of eliminating unnecessary paperwork and red tape, by, for example,
- removing the requirement to keep records of processing in certain low-risk situations;
- replacing data protection officers with senior responsible individuals; and
- reducing the number of cookie consent pop-ups people see online;
- establishing secure digital verification services in order to facilitate smoother and cheaper online transactions
- requiring organisations to improve their cyber security to reduce scams and hacking;
- strengthening the powers of the ICO to tackle nuisance calls and other ways that businesses breach data rules
The Government estimates that the reforms in this bill will save businesses approximately £90 million a year in compliance costs.
What should I do now?
Keep an eye on our blogs and newsletters as we will update our content when the bill comes into force. It’s currently going through Parliament with no specified timeframe for coming into law.
For now, use our Data protection policy toolkit to ensure your business is complying with data protection law.
The Arbitration Bill
The Arbitration Bill is aimed at modernising UK laws on arbitration. As a reminder, arbitration is a form of dispute resolution where two or more parties appoint a third person as an arbitrator to resolve the dispute for them by providing a binding decision. This is an alternative to using the court system.
Under the Arbitration Bill, arbitrators will:
- be allowed to expedite decisions on issues that have no real chance of success;
- be required to disclose circumstances that might give rise to justifiable doubts about their impartiality; and
- be better protected from liability (unless they have acted in bad faith).
Other aspects of the bill include clarifying the law that governs arbitration agreements, simplifying the procedure for challenging arbitral awards, improving the effectiveness of emergency arbitrators, and providing that the court can make orders in support of arbitral proceedings against third parties.
Stay posted for more as this bill progresses through Parliament.
The King also outlined other priorities for the Government, including greater protections for private tenants, a proposed ban on new leasehold houses, strategies to reduce overcrowding in prisons and more. You can find the full speech here.
The content in this article is up to date at the date of publishing. The information provided is intended only for information purposes, and is not for the purpose of providing legal advice. Sparqa Legal’s Terms of Use apply.
Marion joined Sparqa Legal as a Senior Legal Editor in 2018. She previously worked as a corporate/commercial lawyer for five years at one of New Zealand’s leading law firms, Kensington Swan (now Dentons Kensington Swan), and as an in-house legal consultant for a UK tech company. Marion regularly writes for Sparqa’s blog, contributing across its commercial, IP and health and safety law content.