The new law requires that traders – and, indeed, those selling on a private basis – provide goods that are of ‘satisfactory quality’. It also requires that services are provided ‘with reasonable care and skill’. These are reasonably simple concepts which should not demand the intervention of the finest legal minds when it comes to interpreting them in real-life cases.
Of course, while the new law offers more straightforward protection for buyers, it also imposes new duties on sellers. Some traders might resent this, but they are likely to be in a minority. Responsible, well-run businesses will continue to make money offering quality goods and services.
All concerns, well-run and otherwise, also tend to realise that adverse reports of shoddiness spread very quickly in this small community.
But in spite of commercial imperatives that already encourage businesses to trade responsibly, the new law is to be welcomed – if only because it makes matters so much clearer than in the past and has the potential to cut to the quick in disputes where genuine misunderstandings or mistakes are at the root of problems.
Meanwhile, the new law represents a relatively rare example of adapting UK legislation to fit Island conditions without too many significant amendments. There is every reason to believe that provisions that have been tried and tested on the other side of the Channel over many years will work perfectly well here.
It is, though, difficult to understand why it has taken quite so long to transplant ready-made UK law into the Jersey statute book. There is always intense pressure on the law drafting process, but on the face of it, adaptation, as opposed to creating a law from scratch, ought to have been a relatively streamlined procedure.
The real point, however, is that a gap in the law has now been filled – although the gap did not yawn quite as widely as some tended to claim. As a result, buyers’ rights and sellers’ obligations are fully transparent rather than being dependent on rules established before the advent of the motor vehicle and the telephone, let alone the internet.
