ABSTRACT
Many UK tourists started to go on packaged holidays to the Mediterranean in the 1960s. The boom in these types of holidays, sometimes arranged by slightly piratical entrepreneurs, produced many customer complaints both to the press and MPs. As part of a move to bring some order to this chaos the new Labour government in 1964 repurposed the 1962 Molony Committee report and used it as the foundation of an attempt to criminalise misleading statements and holiday brochures. It is difficult to say whether the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 ‘tamed’ the packaged travel industry. It certainly entered popular consciousness (eg a Monty Python Sketch). The Act has largely been superseded but it still exists as law and is often referred to on popular information websites.
There are many other factors which made the packaged travel industry more respectable. These include the fact that most of the hotels were eventually actually built and the swimming pools were actually filled with water and the era of selling holidays using artist impressions in brochures passed into history.
Initially, the introduction of criminal sanctions appears to have had an immediate sharp effect on blameworthy practices but the actions of the courts emptied much of the legislation of its effect. Many of the judges appeared to have cast doubt on whether the criminal law was appropriate for what were in effect mere contractual breaches.
The Act relied on active enforcement by local authorities and their trading officers. This was initially a clever move since this function already existed and the skills required were not dissimilar to those needed to check weights and measures and the quality of, for example, food for sale in shops and restaurants. However, it proved to be too weak a reed to rely on. Local government spending was curtailed during the 1980s and subsequently. There were insufficient funds for this type of checking and enforcement and there were much more pressing calls on their resources.
Broadly the use of criminal law to sanction contractual breaches proved to be a legislative ‘dead-end’.
Brener, Alan, Policymaking and the Trade Description Act 1968: cultural success and legal failure (August 4, 2024).
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