This is a special episode: Quotes from Isabelle Buscke appear in episodes of my podcast. Here is the complete, edited interview with her. Because I think this gives a good impression of how consumer policy works in the EU and which topics are currently being addressed.
Isabelle Buscke has been the Brussels office manager of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV), the umbrella organisation of consumer centres and consumer protection organisations in Germany, for 12 years. She has a degree in political science and linguistics – and brings the positions of the VZBV into the European political arena. In this sense, she is a lobbyist for consumer protection.
New episodes are always published in the middle of the month, on the 2nd Monday of the month in German (indicated by a [de]). One week later, on the 3rd Monday of the month, there is the same episode in English (indicated by the [en] in the title). It is not exactly identical to the de-episode, but almost.
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For this Podcast is used AI, for instance a voice clone for my voice.
And here is the complete, edited interview with her.
Transcript (close to spoken language):
Question: You then make statements or papers and flyers. But how does consumer policy come about? And how do you actually bring them in?
The VZBV has an entire department dedicated solely to knowing and understanding where the shoe pinches for consumers in Germany. On the one hand, this is the data that we receive from the consumer centres, which in turn generate it from consumer complaints. As a consumer in Germany, you can go to your nearest consumer advice centre. If you have a problem with a provider that you cannot get resolved or if you have the feeling that you have been scammed or something similar. The colleagues at the consumer advice centre try to help them get out of this situation. This is recorded statistically and these complaints can be analysed, for example statistically analysed in the sense that you can see: The telecommunications sector, for example, is doing better this year than in previous years. And then you can also see whether this is possibly due to a change in the law or, on the contrary, whether company y has attracted particular attention in the last year. Perhaps they have a business model that is new, which leads to problems for consumers and so on. But this is the one piece of data that we have, which we are constantly analysing and into which we then also delve a little to see what the background to these problems actually is. This – coupled with scientific research, surveys and focus groups – is the data basis that we use. And of course our injunctions, for example what we win or lose in court, is also an indicator of how well consumer law actually works. And these are the findings that we are trying to incorporate into the European legislative process by explaining where certain provisions do not work or where companies are specifically exploiting a loophole to the detriment of consumers.
Question: How do you incorporate this here on site?
On the one hand, we must always be informed about what is being discussed here, both in the European Parliament and in the European Commission. But we spend a lot of time talking to all the people involved in the decision-making process. This differs depending on the stage of the legislative process.
The Commission has the sole right of initiative at European level. This means that at the beginning of a process you often talk more with the European Commission, provide them with the data, explain the problems, try to understand what problem the European Commission itself has identified and is trying to solve. And sometimes it’s simply a matter of the fact that in a process that the European Commission has identified, they don’t even realise that it is also relevant for consumers how things are being done now. And that you also get involved and bring this perspective to the table.
So it actually works a lot through personal conversations and explaining things. And of course we also put the whole thing in writing. A classic job that our colleagues in Berlin have to do is to write statements on legislative proposals. Of course we do press work and talk to multipliers of various kinds. But journalists are particularly important here. However, our colleagues in communications also try to reach other target groups. So in general: What does consumer policy do? What is it good for? How can consumers get help? What options are there for dispute resolution? That’s the whole toolbox that we use, of course. And what we are also trying to show is the new instrument of class actions. So how can European policy – because it was a European directive that introduced this – help people in their everyday lives by giving them back money that companies have illegally taken out of their pockets?
Question: But you probably don’t speak directly to the commissioners? Or how should I imagine that? Are they then involved in dialogue at many levels in Parliament and the EU Commission?
That is correct. We also talk to the Commissioners from time to time, but that certainly happens maybe two or three times in a legislative period. Certainly with the respective Commissioner responsible for consumer protection, perhaps once a year with the others much less frequently. You don’t always have to. The commissioners have their own staff, of course, and they also have the departments. So you have to think of it like a ministry, it’s organised hierarchically and you don’t always have to talk to the political top, but it’s often enough to talk to the heads of departments or divisions. They often work very specifically on a project, have a particular interest and are then also particularly well versed in the subject matter and understand well what added value you can bring them or what information you can contribute. This all has its advantages and disadvantages. It makes sense to talk to different people at different points in the process.
Question: A new commission has just been appointed. What do you expect from the Commission in particular with regard to consumer protection?
The new European Commission has a very strong focus on economic policy. This is not fundamentally a problem, because consumers are also part of the economy. You are at the end of the economic chain. And that is why we are always involved in consumer policy. The question then is: Where is the focus? At the moment, the focus is on industrial policy and competitiveness. This always harbours the risk that consumer concerns and the everyday worries of consumers may move out of focus. This is certainly one of the focal points that we will set to ensure that this does not fall out of focus. There are some flagship projects of this European Commission from which we expect a great deal. They have already been announced, so we are confident that they will come. The first is the adaptation of European consumer law to digitalisation in general and to digital business models. What is it all about? I want to shop in a webshop and am asked three times whether I would like the newsletter and here is another pop-up and here I can still win something and there I am told quickly, quickly, there are only two left in stock, although this is often not true. We have also analysed this. These types of manipulation of consumers when they are in the process of making a purchase decision or trying to make one – there are endless possibilities in the digital space. If you go into a shop, somewhere in the shopping street, this is significantly less. And this discrepancy should be eliminated so that consumers are better able to make autonomous purchasing decisions that truly reflect their interests and not the interests of companies. This is known as digital fairness. This also runs under the aegis of the Consumer Protection Commissioner. That’s what he announced. He acknowledged this in his hearing. We have great expectations of it.
And another major issue that the von der Leyen Commission has announced is to put an end to the annoying nuisances in European rail transport. At the moment, consumers are faced with the obstacle that if they want to travel across Europe by train, they cannot book a ticket in one place that covers their entire journey and is fully protected by passenger rights. The Commission wants to change this, which we very much welcome, and this will certainly be an issue that we will devote a great deal of attention to. This is now also specific to the Commissioner for Consumer Protection. It focusses on these two topics from the city.
The last topic on the subject of railways is with the Transport Commissioner.
Consumer protection is a horizontal issue, a cross-cutting issue. This can be found in almost every policy area. Telecommunications work, energy policy, food and nutrition policy and all this is spread across many Commissioners and their various departments.
Question: In other words, we are dealing with a lot of people who are somehow working on consumer protection issues. Would you clarify your own position on the Digital Fairness Act?
Exactly. Personally, I don’t find the term dark patterns transparent at all. That’s why I prefer to use the word manipulation or manipulative design. Ultimately, it’s about how the digital world is designed and which features are displayed to us when we are in the purchasing process or about to conclude a contract. And our research shows that you can be held back quite a bit. E.G. if you want to cancel. It’s incredibly complicated to know where you can do that. You are subtly manipulated by suggesting that there is a shortage of the product you are looking at, by saying that there are only so many pieces left in stock or so many other potential buyers are looking at it.
There is a lot of addictive editing and designs where you keep looking and looking and looking and you really want to get to the end of the list and it goes on and on and on and you spend a lot more time on these websites and platforms than you originally wanted to. And in doing so, you also pay with your attention and your time. This is interesting for companies. They have higher advertising revenues. You are always shown adverts. We would like this to be fundamentally prevented by introducing a principle – we call this fairness by design and by default, i. g. as a standard setting. The default setting is not to display a personalised selection that may not meet my expectations. I should be able to set this manually, but basically it should be fair and transparent.
And the design should not be manipulative either. So not all those little games I just mentioned. That’s one of the basic requirements we have in mind.
Question: Then I’ll move on to the second topic of rail travel. Why don’t you go into more detail about what the actual situation is and how it could or should change?
We have passenger rights for all modes of transport at European level. You often don’t know that. So, you are certainly familiar with air passenger rights if you are flying and rail passenger rights if you are travelling by train. But there are also passenger rights for long-distance coach transport and for ship and ferry transport. So, maybe we Germans just don’t use it that often. There are not that many ferries.
And two topics will definitely become virulent in the next few years. One is passenger rights. There is a proposal from the European Commission from 2013, which has already matured somewhat and was stuck with the member states for a very long time. They couldn’t agree on a position and then it was frozen. And in the meantime, there have been several airline bankruptcies, in the meantime there was the Covid pandemic. A lot has happened and air passenger rights are in need of a major overhaul. Above all, there have been many, many judgements by the European Court of Justice, which has interpreted the undefined regulations. For example What is force majeure? Is a flight crew strike force majeure?
Why is this relevant? There is currently a clause in these passenger rights that says in the event of force majeure, airlines are not obliged to pay the compensation to passengers that is normally provided for delays. That is a huge gap. That is very unsatisfactory. Consumers are confronted with this time and again. They now want to reform that too. That is basically a good thing. The problem is that the European Commission’s proposal weakens current passenger rights. Of course, this is not a satisfactory situation. And the proposal has not been updated. This is still the proposal from 2013. Of course, many of the problems we have seen in the Covid pandemic have not even been considered. We will have to put in a lot of work to ensure that passenger rights improve rather than deteriorate.
The other is a rather newer project, actually rail passenger rights. They were only reformed a little at European level in 2017. But from a traveller’s point of view, this was not satisfactory. The biggest gap we have at the moment is the issue of missed connections if you are not travelling with a transport company. So if I’m only travelling in Germany with Deutsche Bahn and I miss my connection, I can just take the next train. But that doesn’t actually work internationally. I don’t have that right.
For example, if I’m travelling to France on the ICE and want to take a French connecting train there. And then you often find yourself in a situation where you have to buy a new train ticket at the ticket counter on the day of departure at the highest price. From our point of view, this is not in the spirit of the inventor. And this also has to do with the fact that you can’t buy a through ticket in cross-border traffic, or if you can, then only in the rarest of cases. And if you can’t buy this train ticket, then you have no guarantee that you can simply take the next train in the event of delays.
And it is precisely this problem that the European Commission is now addressing by saying that it must be possible to book these tickets in a single booking process, either online or at a ticket counter. But not that you have to search for tickets on different booking platforms. This must be possible in the future. And this must also ensure – regardless of how many different transport companies you have to use in the rail sector – that you always get a follow-up guarantee. This also has a lot to do with liberalisation, which is now having a greater impact on the rail sector. In Germany, of course, Deutsche Bahn still has the lion’s share, but there are more and more competitors, some of them regional. And in other countries this is already much more pronounced, so we have to look at how our railway system remains compatible overall and how we can turn it into a single market for passengers. Yes, that’s very much a historical thing.
The rail market or the railway market is a very special sector that has emerged from national monopolies. And which is still not fully liberalised. We continue to see many of the historical players, for example the historical railway companies that are still in state hands. Deutsche Bahn is also wholly owned by the German state. And this means that different interests are always mixed up in terms of profitability or perhaps also the public interest in a functioning service. That’s a bit of a discrepancy here. And not all member states agree on this.
What is added is a service that is network-bound. The network rail is very, very expensive, requires a lot of investment and maintenance and is not standardised in the same way everywhere. We still have different rail widths, we still have different current strengths at the consumers. This means that not all trains can run everywhere in the European Union. You need special trains for cross-border transport. These are all obstacles to good and free-flowing international transport. And the interests involved in tickets are quite interesting, because if you look at it historically, the former state monopolists worked better together. In the 1960s, it was easier to get through tickets to neighbouring countries than it is today. The market was also chopped up a bit, I’d say.
We have a lot of hope. In her political guidelines, Ursula von der Leyen has given her Commissioner and her services a very strong mandate. And that can only lead to good things.
Question: Perhaps again on more recent things that are currently being implemented. I’m thinking of the fast instant bank transfer, for example. So of course there are also the comments that it all took far too long.
In fact, there is still a bit of a difference in treatment between banks and banking services and other means of payment and payment service providers.
This is also not entirely trivial. It is possible that some other payment service providers such as PayPal, which there are also many others, may have been faster. But the problem is that it’s not quite the same thing. Many consumers don’t even realise that the data usage agreements they enter into with PayPal and others, for example, are much more generous. Paypal processes much more personal data than a bank can and may do with a bank transfer. This data is of course also frequently passed on to third parties. These are processed into profiles. These then flow back into creditworthiness checks. It’s not without its problems and equal treatment is not necessarily a given.
This is one of the reasons why the VZBV is in favour of a digital euro. So this is also a major project of the European Union to create a digital counterpart to the European Central Bank’s cash. It’s not technically trivial, but it would offer many advantages, also in comparison to the many private digital payment service providers we see on the market.
At the moment, when you are not paying with cash, you often pay by card. This is simply still one of the most popular and widespread means of payment. But for this to work, and especially for it to work throughout Europe, we are all dependent on either Visa or Mastercard and the payment system behind it. It’s a private payment system, a commercial one, and it’s not that cheap overall. We don’t realise this immediately because we as consumers are not paying for it now. But the retailers pay for it, of course, and it’s lucrative for the banks, because they also get money for it.
But the advantage of a state digital means of payment would be that it would be much more inclusive. Because not everyone gets a Visa card. But a digital euro would be much more inclusive and everyone would have a right to it, just like cash. The digital means of payment could also be designed offline, for example within certain amount limits, so that payments can be made from reader to reader or from mobile phone to mobile phone, for example, even without an Internet connection. These could be the advantages, but also the fact that you are simply much less limited. Who is authorised to participate and for what purposes? It could be made much more anonymous.
The European Commission’s proposal can indeed still be improved in this area, but it could be designed to be much more anonymous than what is currently available with commercial digital payment options. For us, it is also a question of resilience and European autonomy that we do not become dependent on service providers from third countries, in this case now from the USA. But who knows, there are other economic powers in the world that are also pushing very hard into the European market. That’s why this adjustment of how long it actually takes until a real-time transfer is equated with a normal transfer has many regulatory reasons, but also always has the reason that you don’t want to force all the changes on all the players in the market, in this case the banks, overnight, but also give them appropriate transition periods. So that they can implement it properly. The advantage of long transition periods is of course always the hope that it will really work straight away and that there won’t be the same difficulties as with debit cards in Germany, for example.
That was a bigger problem. The disadvantage of longer transition periods is that we are all scratching our heads as to why things aren’t moving faster.
Question: The fast instant transfer immediately ensures that we save money. That has an immediate impact on our lives. Is this perhaps a positive example of EU regulation at the end of the day?
There are a lot of positive examples in consumer protection. So the right of cancellation in online retail or distance selling in general, that we have 14 days to consider whether what we couldn’t look at in a shop but only online, whether we really want it, whether it really meets our expectations and that we can also return and send it back without giving a reason. I don’t think we need to talk about roaming in the mobile phone sector for long. Consumers have been so quick to accept this and have practically adopted it as a God-given fact. It makes you wonder how you managed without it in the past. But it has taken us ten years, all together, all European consumer organisations together. We pushed and pushed and pulled and pulled and pulled until it was finally achieved that the roaming surcharges were actually abolished.
We encounter resistance time and again. It is not always obvious to all market players that consumer protection and good consumer policy are ultimately also advertising for the economy. Because people are now using their mobile phones much more. The data packets are much larger. You spend a lot more than you used to, so to speak. People are using all the services much more and now also across borders. And I am not yet aware of any company that has gone under due to roaming, although this has been repeatedly claimed.
So this is a constant that we are of course also confronted with, that companies like to say that if this is regulated, then it will be the end of the European sector. I am confronted with this every day, from energy and telecommunications to the mobility sector and food. Yes, unfortunately it’s part of the political process that people no longer rely solely on established facts and scientific findings, but that everyone now has their own truth. That is regrettable. Of course, economic relationships are not a natural science. They are not as easy to observe as scientific correlations. That’s why they’re always a bit ideological.
In the end, the question is: How does the European Union see itself? What is the self-image? Am I a community for the people or am I a community for economic players and then excluding consumers?
And I think that is also a bit of the debate that we will now be having very strongly with the new Commission in this new legislative period. Do we take people’s everyday economic concerns seriously? Can we justify in any way that people are structurally ripped off and economically disadvantaged because it is in the interests of some companies? In the end, that is the big question. And it is regrettable that many sectors of the economy prioritise their own interests and to a certain extent blackmail politicians by saying: well, otherwise jobs will be lost. We will experience this now. We are already experiencing it. Hardly a week goes by without a well-known company in Germany announcing that it is cutting jobs in Germany.
This is certainly not easy to handle, neither for politicians, nor for the people affected, nor for the companies concerned. But on the other hand, there are many sectors that have been saying for five years: We can’t get any skilled labour. And have similar manufacturing industries, such as the automotive industry, which simply produce something different.
Of course you have to retrain people, you have to think about it. But I have noticed that politicians are allowing themselves to be put under a lot of pressure and that this is somewhat obscuring their view of what other interests people have apart from a job. And that the loss of a job is not necessarily the same as losing a job: I will never find a job again.
It is very easy for companies to argue that it costs me so and so much money. That costs so many jobs and so many per cent of the gross domestic product.
For us consumer advocates, it is much more difficult to say: It costs the person so and so many hours of their private time hanging on hold on the phone until someone helps and answers the phone. It will cost you so and so many emails until you have ironed out the problem with customer service. It costs them so and so much money to go to a lawyer to sue for 50 euros here and 150 euros there. These are all data that can only be used as examples, of course, but are not representative.
And that leads to an imbalance, also in the political debate. Because we want to work seriously. We do not deal with figures and data that we cannot substantiate. We cannot say that poor consumer protection costs so and so many jobs.
Transparency Notice
I received a travel allowance from the EU Parliament for this episode. I also used the services and radio studios of the EU Parliament in Brussels.
Of course, no influence was exerted on my reporting.