Making a career of championing consumer rights

Jim Murray has been the voice of the European consumer for nearly two decades. Lorraine Mallinder reports.

After 17 years spent championing the cause of the European consumer, Jim Murray knows the Brussels lobbying scene better than most. The landscape has become "darker", with an increasing number of players ready to "play hardball" says the former director of pan-European consumer group BEUC.

Much of the aggression has been directed at BEUC. In his goodbye speech to BEUC last month, Murray accused unethical lobbyists of investing more energy into cutting off public funding granted to his organisation than into answering its arguments. BEUC is largely funded by the Community budget. It is a subsidy, Murray says, that the organisation works hard for. With it, comes a significant degree of scrutiny. BEUC, the main voice of Europe’s consumer lobby, is constantly being held to account for its results.

"I was 27 when I first set foot on the continent," says Murray. A qualified lawyer, he started his career as an engineer for the Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs, later moving on to become director of the National Social Service Board, a public organisation charged with maintaining a network of voluntary consumer information centres throughout the country. It was as director of consumer affairs and fair trade, a post that gave him chief responsibility for overseeing the introduction of a range of national consumer protection and competition rules, that the Irishman first came to Brussels to attend working groups and meetings on familiar-sounding laws such as the consumer credit directive.

"The first one was as much a mess as the current one," he says of that particular law. "They couldn’t agree on methods of calculating interest rates." The directive, aimed at harmonising credit rules across the Union, dates from 1987 and is currently undergoing its second, highly complex makeover.

Co-decision, the decision-making mechanism introduced through the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which gives the European Parliament the power to adopt legislation jointly with the Council of Ministers, vastly changed the Brussels lobbying landscape. "It opened up the process and made it possible for anybody in the right place to propose amendments that could appear in the final directive," says Murray. "Before co-decision, there was a feeling the battle was lost when things came out of the [European] Commission."

Murray laments the muddier aspects of co-decision, which lead to agreements regularly being cooked up by the Commission, the Council and the Parliament before their release. "It’s a process that’s behind closed doors and you have to be in Brussels to influence it," he says. "It means on a wider level there’s no point in lobbying after first reading." BEUC, says Murray, did not bother participating in the second reading of the audiovisual media services directive. It simply was not worth it.

Murray’s sadness at leaving BEUC is palpable. Letting go of the reins after so many years will, one senses, not be easy. Although he will continue to play an active role in the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue and the recently launched high-level group on administrative burdens, Murray will miss the unpredictability of working for BEUC. "Our point of view didn’t always fall into a convenient left-wing category," he says. "All of our members supported the liberalisation of utilities which is supposed to be a right-wing thing. BEUC was probably one of the only NGOs that had anything good to say about the services directive."

The experience of leading BEUC has made Murray more of a free-marketeer than he thought possible when he first started out. Although he is "more alive to the merits of the market" than he used to be, Murray warns against viewing liberalisation as an end in itself, as the present Commission is often accused of doing.

In all Murray’s time in Brussels, consumers have never had it so good. The consumer champion leaves BEUC at a time when the Commission is incessantly trying to drum up support for the European project through consumer-friendly initiatives. Murray is more aware than most, however, of the convenience of draping the consumer flag around whichever political agenda happens to be on the table.

• Getting started:

For those interested in launching a career in consumer policy at EU level, BEUC is a good starting point. The organisation runs six-month paid internships in all of its departments, with stipends comparable to those paid by the European Commission. Full time salaries are "decent", according to BEUC director general Monique Goyens, but lower than those paid by the EU institutions and industry lobbies. "For the same level of education you won't have the same salary," she says.

Outside Brussels, national consumer organisations are also a good starting point. In addition to traditional advocacy work, many publish magazines with expert advice for consumers. The UK’s Which? magazine, a monthly which has now been running for 50 years, is funded entirely by its subscribers with no advertisements.

Jim Murray has been the voice of the European consumer for nearly two decades. Lorraine Mallinder reports.