The chairman of the Commons Committee on Business, Innovation, Science and Trade has written to Amazon and TikTok to raise concerns about their reluctance to appear at the consumer protection hearing on the online market next Tuesday, November 3.
In a letter dated today, Liam Byrne asked each company to provide a representative to the session, which will consider “important and timely consumer protection matters relating to the regulation of online marketplaces, and the sale of products within them.”
The letter was addressed to Monica Ariño, director of UK public policy in the UK, and Alistair Law, TikTok’s director of public policy for Northern Europe. The two letters are the same as the name of the recipient and the name of the company. He did not say whether either company had declined the invitation, or for what reason, if any, the company had given it.
Byrne wrote: “You will appreciate the central role you play in this market, and the importance of parliamentary scrutiny of the security and financial concerns of British citizens.”
He added: “This disregard for parliamentary oversight reflects your company’s unwillingness to engage with policymakers, and hinders the Committee’s ability to ensure appropriate regulation and protection.
The Committee, called the Business and Trade Committee when it started this work, has taken evidence on consumer protection. In the session on June 23, Amazon was represented by Dr. Thomas Bell, the UK leader for product safety external relations, along with witnesses from Temu and eBay, according to the minutes of the committee of the meeting.
In an earlier panel, Sue Davies, head of consumer rights policy at Which?, told MPs that the consumer group had created a tool using Google Lens to search the market for products subject to official recalls. They said they found 800 similar or similar products, on sites including Amazon, Temu, eBay, AliExpress and TikTok Shop.
Byrne told David MacKenzie, chairman of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, that consumer losses amount to £71bn a year, with around £5bn flowing from goods bought from online markets, according to a transcript of the published session. MacKenzie said the issue was “really all over the place”.
Wayne Mackay, director of policy and public affairs at Electrical Safety First, said the organization used machine learning models to scan more than 24,000 listings and found that about one in 18 products were noncompliant.
MacKenzie also told the committee there were 4,260 trading standards staff in the UK in 2002, compared to 2,378 the year before the hearing.
Davies told MPs that the government’s consultation under the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 proposed a duty to look after online markets to prevent, identify and remove dangerous products from the platform. They say they also recommend checking the market, such as verifying the seller’s contact details. Committee member John Cooper said during the session that the consultation had closed for the day.
Both platforms host many UK business sellers. More than 200,000 sellers in the UK trade on the TikTok Shop, according to figures provided in October 2025 when Royal Mail became the main delivery partner of the TikTok Shop in the UK.
Amazon says that by 2021 around 60 percent of physical product sales in its UK stores will come from independent sellers, mostly small and medium-sized UK businesses.
Byrne’s letter simply requested that each company make a representative available for the hearing. He did not name the executives he wanted the committee to hear from, or specify the questions lawmakers wanted to ask.
A hearing on November 3 is due to cover the regulation of online markets and the sale of products, according to the letter.