Business and Trade Committee

23 June 2026

Business and Trade Committee Actual start House of Commons

10:29 - 10:56
Speaker 1
Order, order. 

Welcome to today's session of the Business and Trade Select Committee as we pursue our ongoing investigation into consumer protection in the UK.  Thank you so much indeed to our witnesses for joining us to help us set the stage for this.  Sue Davies, if I might start with you.  So, could you just lay out, what, what are the chief risks to UK consumers now from buying goods in online marketplaces?  It looks like a bit of a free-for-all for us, but tell me if I'm wrong. 
10:56 - 11:54
Speaker 2
Good afternoon.  No, I don't think you're wrong.  We find a huge range of problems through the investigations that we carry out at Which?, where we find that consumers face a wide range of risks. 

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has improved things to some extent in that it's dealt with certain risks like fake reviews, making them a banned practice, for example.  But we still think there are a lot of gaps and there's still lots of challenges with enforcement that really need to be addressed so that businesses behave more responsibly.  A particular problem that we find is unsafe products, and particularly unsafe products on online marketplaces.  Over the last seven years, possibly even longer, Which? has been doing regular testing of a whole range of products, from toys, tools, electrical appliances, and we we regularly find unsafe products, and we think that shows that there's still a big gap in the legislation. 

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