The chair of the Commons Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee has written to Amazon and TikTok raising concern about their reluctance to appear at a consumer protection hearing on online marketplaces next Tuesday, 3 November.

In letters dated today, Liam Byrne asked each company to make a representative available for the session, which he said will consider “important and timely consumer protection matters relating to the regulation of online marketplaces, and the sale of products within them.”

The letters went to Monica Ariño, Amazon’s UK director of public policy, and Alistair Law, TikTok’s director of public policy for Northern Europe. The two letters are worded identically apart from the recipient and company name. They do not say whether either company has formally declined the invitation, or what reasons, if any, the companies have given.

Byrne wrote: “You will appreciate the major role you play in this market, and the vital importance of parliamentary scrutiny of matters concerning the safety and financial interests of UK citizens.”

He added: “Disregard of parliamentary oversight reflects badly on your company’s willingness to engage with policymakers, and hampers the Committee’s ability to ensure regulation and protections are fit for purpose. These protections are essential safeguards for the customers from whom you draw revenue.”

The committee, which was called the Business and Trade Committee when it began this work, has already taken evidence on consumer protection. At a session on 23 June, Amazon was represented by Dr Thomas Bell, its UK lead for product safety external relations, alongside witnesses from Temu and eBay, according to the committee’s record of the meeting.

In the panel before them, Sue Davies, head of consumer rights policy at Which?, told MPs the consumer group had built a tool using Google Lens to search marketplaces for products subject to official recalls. She said it found 800 products that were identical or appeared almost identical, on sites including Amazon, Temu, eBay, AliExpress and TikTok Shop.

Byrne put it to David MacKenzie, chair of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, that consumer detriment totals some £71bn a year, with about £5bn flowing from goods bought from online marketplaces, according to the published transcript of the session. MacKenzie said the problems were “genuinely across the board”.

Wayne Mackay, director of policy and public affairs at Electrical Safety First, said his organisation had used a machine learning model to scan more than 24,000 listings and found that roughly one in 18 products was likely to be non-compliant.

MacKenzie also told the committee there were 4,260 trading standards staff in Great Britain in 2002, compared with 2,378 in the year before the hearing.

Davies told MPs that a government consultation under the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 proposes a duty of care for online marketplaces to prevent, identify and remove dangerous products from their platforms. She said it also suggests checks by marketplaces, such as verifying sellers’ contact details. Committee member John Cooper said during the session that the consultation had closed that day.

Both platforms host large numbers of UK business sellers. More than 200,000 UK-based sellers trade on TikTok Shop, according to figures given in October 2025 when Royal Mail became TikTok Shop’s primary UK delivery partner.

Amazon said in 2021 that around 60 per cent of physical product sales on its UK store came from independent sellers, most of them small and medium-sized UK businesses.

Byrne’s letters ask only that each company make a representative available for the hearing. They do not name which executives the committee would like to hear from, or set out the questions MPs intend to put.

The hearing on 3 November is due to cover the regulation of online marketplaces and the sale of products on them, according to the letters.

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