Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the amendment, but I am not sure that I would advocate it in this form. I am very familiar with the cost of something being “from £X” and you find you have to order three dozen of whatever it is in order to get the £X. That has always been a bone of contention for me. Where I depart from the noble Baroness is when it comes to an area of my own expertise, which I shall use as an example.

In party-wall cases, where people want to undertake certain work to their building, they have to serve a notice on the adjoining owner, and if the adjoining owner does not agree, then the parties have to appoint surveyors to deal with the matter for them. That takes the two neighbours out of the frame, which is part of how the thing is designed to work. The person proposing the work is obliged under the legislation to meet the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner, which may include their professional fees. When a surveyor is faced with this situation, as I frequently am, it may be a building owner but it is normally an adjoining owner who rings up and says, “I have been served with a notice by our neighbour and I think I need a surveyor”. Assuming that it is a case which needs a surveyor and that they are not best advised to agree to the thing and let their neighbour get on with it, there is then the question of how to structure the fee that is dealt with.

There is a European directive on the provision of services. I forget its precise name, but I am sure that the Minister will know about it—I will find out if necessary and write to her. One of the things in it refers to the cost of the service provided or the manner of calculating it shall be set out—I do not know whether I am quoting that verbatim but it is something along those lines—along with all the other things, including the identity of the trader, the time taken to deliver the service and that sort of thing. The difficulty is that, until one gets on site, one does not necessarily know what one is faced with. You may take on a job and then find that the person promoting the work has a fly-by-night builder but has no engineer on site, yet they are doing things involving some quite serious construction that affects, for instance, party walls or adjacent excavation in an urban environment. You may conclude that they are not doing it safely. They may also have as their surveyor someone who is not that experienced and does not know what is supposed to be done. Then you end up having to hold the hand of the other person’s surveyor.

All this can run up costs which one did not anticipate at first, so providing full details of the total cost of the service in that instance would be nigh-on impossible. However, providing the mechanism for calculating it is perfectly reasonable. It so happens that, under party-wall legislation, the building owner carrying out the works is obliged to refund only the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner. There is that fall-back and it is obviously up to the surveyor to justify the reasonableness of whatever it may be—the hourly charge, the amount of travel, the frequency of visits and everything else. However, the total costs in such circumstances would be extremely difficult to pin down.

That might also happen in any other construction-related job where there are a number of variables and where, typically, you will have provisional sums in a building contract to cover certain things. Those might be based on a prime cost or just a spot figure, but they are subject to a demonstration of the amount of man-hours and materials that have gone into the job at the end of the day. Sometimes I get called in, as do colleagues, to try to deal with situations where the amount claimed is unreasonable because a contractor has an add-only calculator or the consumer is on a fixed budget and cannot agree to anything that exceeds it, and so on.

The idea is to get to having provisions that deal with the real world of things. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady King, has rightly pointed to a situation where you buy a product, such as the tickets to the theatre or whatever it is. Inevitably, services do not necessarily quite fall into that category. Yes, you can get a fixed price for doing your bathroom floor—I am sorry to go on about bathrooms but your Lordships get the drift—but other things are not capable of being drilled down to that degree of finesse. I would advise a bit of caution and flexibility in the overall approach.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness. Who wants to upset their mother? My mother-in-law is 95 tomorrow; I am taking her to see “War Horse” and I have paid the surplus on the tickets, so I understand the point. I am particularly interested in Amendment 50G because you might be left on these phones for a long time while trying to enforce your rights. That is an interesting matter for the Minister. There may be existing legislation to deal with that issue but it is worth following through.

I am much more concerned about Amendment 48B, the lead amendment, because its wording seems to run exceptionally widely. Thinking about how this might work, to take another example, you may buy a service as part of a package of services and not wish to buy all that package at once. An alarm for your house might be a plain alarm but you might have sensors or lights outside. You might or might not have it connected to a central station. It might be wireless or with a cable. You buy the basic system and later decide to upgrade it. You have the same service, but I am not clear what the requirement would be for a supplier of such equipment to fulfil any additional services fees or charges that could be incurred by the buyer. The buyer could incur quite a lot of charges if they chose to make changes along the way. Would they then be able to use this measure as a basis for defaulting on or changing the contract?

I found the wording potentially rather alarmingly wide. What the Government have in Clause 50(1) as it stands deals with the issues which I think are in the back of the noble Baroness’s mind. Proposed new subsection (1B) in Amendment 48B contains the word “portrayed”. If the information is to be portrayed for an internet purchase, which is the example that the noble Baroness gave, that is going to be quite difficult.

Although I have sympathy with Amendment 50G, I think that Amendment 48B is probably redundant, and the Minister may well say that Amendment 50G is covered by another piece of legislation.

Localism Bill

Debate between Earl of Lytton and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Thursday 7th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

I rise briefly to underline the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, that once the shop or pub is closed the game is almost certainly over. It is certainly past half-time, and every month during which they are closed makes it less likely that they can recover. It is absolutely astonishing how quickly shopping and drinking habits change. I referred on Tuesday to my involvement with a pub company. We inevitably have a continuous refurbishment programme for our 2,400 pubs, involving putting in new lighting, carpets and so on. We have to go in and get out very quickly. If a pub is closed for refurbishment for a couple of weeks, people start to drift away. They know it is going to be reopened and that it will be better, because that is part of the programme, but you have to be incredibly quick about it. The noble Lord made a powerful point that we have to take into account when considering this matter.

Perhaps I may say to my noble friend Lord True that the arrival of Tesco damages not only in terms of shopping patterns but in the pricing of the beer and alcohol it sells, which undermines all local pubs because it sells virtually at cost price.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, this is such a complex part of what is in any event a complex Bill with a new concept of localism, but I confess that it is extremely difficult to know where to start on this chapter. I begin with the three words to which I should like to bring back the Committee’s focus—assets, community and value. Each word opens up a raft of complex and interwoven considerations. I am pleased that the noble Lords, Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Greaves, have brought forward this series of clause stand-part debates to deal with the chapter as it is important to see it as a whole.

On the question of assets, one might ask, “Whose assets?”. Are they land or are they services and facilities? The two are not the same. Are they intrinsic assets, are they activities or are they something that indirectly protects some other asset? Is it a current asset, a potential asset or a previous asset that has been lost? I do not need to say more, other than that it is always very difficult to turn the clock back. As to “community” as a term of art, in this part of the Bill one might ask: how local is it? How representative is it? What are its objectives? Is an objective stance being taken on behalf of the community? “Value” is a word with which I, as a practising valuer, am very familiar. What is the purpose? To whom is it of value? What is the time horizon and what are the constraints relating to it, including planning issues?

I turn to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. I spent the first seven years of my professional life working out of an inner city area. I spent the next four-and-a-half years working mostly in Greater London. I can relate to the issue of redundant land and wasteland. Even if they cannot immediately be used they have a negative effect by blighting the appearance of a neighbourhood. I wondered whether “asset” also meant the converse—the non-assets that detract. If so, we need to be much more careful about what we are defining.

Wasteland often relates to orphan sites that have somehow been left over. I alluded to this on Tuesday in connection with bits of rural verge. The same thing happens when urban land is built out. During the great expansion of the Victorian era, all sorts of things were left behind and no one knows who owns them. It may be that there is a case for adopting a sweeping-up principle but, if so, I would follow the dictum of the noble Lord, Lord True, that the issue is not for this Bill. It must be dealt with somewhere else.

However, perhaps the former statutory undertaker on redundant utility property land and that owned by charities, religious foundations and government agencies should have a specific social responsibility to make that land available to the community as a first choice. I point the finger at the privatised utilities in that respect. But that raises all sorts of issues, because privatised utilities are now large companies. They may be owned by French conglomerates or Scottish power companies. It is difficult to turn the clock back because the horse has gone from the stable. It does not matter what we do about the stable door, we cannot deal with that problem. As has been mentioned before, peer pressure or government pressure on companies may procure better social responsibility concerning some of that land. Again, we cannot put that in the Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, touched on a matter which I first thought might be dealt with under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act: that the future use of land can be governed by legal agreements. The problem is that the legacy of past practice did not foresee where we are now. Again, it may be difficult to turn the clock back. It is possible that what we are considering is not relevant under planning law. There could be a lacuna here that we have to deal with.

I cannot remember which noble Lord mentioned Ministry of Defence land. Try getting the Treasury on side. A little thing called best value and getting the proper return for the taxpayer is trotted out. If any Member of your Lordships' House has a sure-fire way of getting hold of the Treasury, I have another proposition that I was not going to float. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, knows what it is. If you give a douceur for offering land or assets to the community—a tax credit or tax break—you might find people making an orderly queue instead of running a mile. I have no confidence that Her Majesty's Treasury will be brought on side for that. I am also confident that it lies outside the scope of the Bill.

A county officer of parish and town councils told me not long ago that he had been approached by a parish about whether this chapter, once enacted, would enable a parish to bid for land where the recalcitrant owner was threatening to sell his paddock to Travellers. I dare say that that was a wind-up by the owner, but it brings into question whether such negatives are part of the concept of asset or something different. I think that the parish was told that the council did not think that the Bill was the right vehicle for that. I point out that relationships are not necessarily always lovely between private individuals, as owners, and communities, in either urban or rural areas. I cannot help pointing out the possibility of what I can only describe as sharp practice, where a local commercial interest gets alongside a community interest with the intention of collaborating over the ultimate division of spoils of a land development project. That is not as far-fetched as one might think. It operates as, “You, the community interest, use your neighbourhood planning and asset nomination rights and we, the commercial interest, will put in some funding and technical backing”.