Bailiffs: Regulatory Reform
Yvonne Fovargue Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) on securing the debate. I have long been interested in bailiff practice both as chair of the all-party group on debt and personal finance, and from my long association with Citizens Advice as manager of the local bureau. I had hoped that the 2014 regulations would stop the bad practice I saw when I was doing that work. I saw bailiffs who threatened to take children into care. On one occasion I heard them trying to seize a family pet in front of the children. Perversely, the regulations have created consolidation into bigger firms, and it is easier for the people at the top of those firms to blame individual bailiffs as rogues, and to say that it is nothing to do with them, their training or their practices. I have sympathy for individual bailiffs. As we have heard, there are some very bad employment practices such as working on commission and payment by results. We must stop the cycle of desperate people chasing desperate people.
Bailiffs are still breaching the new regulations. According to StepChange, a third of the 2.2 million people contacted by bailiffs in the past two years experienced them flouting the law. Bailiffs forced entry and took goods needed for work. Half the StepChange clients surveyed in 2016 said that affordable repayment plans had been refused. I have certainly never known a bailiff to accept the single financial statement that most other creditors accept. Complaints are too difficult. Only 28% of people complain and, as we have heard, there have been 56 complaints to the court since 2014. Does that mean that we have had only 56 problems with bailiffs? The charities would certainly dispute that.
To me, the question is not why we should regulate bailiffs but why we should not. Everyone else is regulated. Debt collectors and debt charities are regulated, but bailiffs are free from oversight by an independent regulator despite dealing with people in probably the most vulnerable circumstances who should have the most protection. Their only protection at the moment is guidance. As others have asked, what are the sanctions if that is ignored? Many hon. Members have put forward the same solution: independent regulation twinned with a simplified single free and independent complaints procedure similar to the system used for debt collectors. It is not only the frontline charities who call for that—some bailiffs firms would like it because they want to get some of the rogues out of the business. Self-regulation has not worked. There is enough evidence to prove that there is a systemic problem and not just a few bad apples. Everyone who deals with people in very vulnerable circumstances is regulated, so I ask the Minister why bailiffs should be the exception. I ask her to act quickly to prevent anyone else paying the highest price, as Jerome Rogers did.
Oral Answers to Questions
Yvonne Fovargue Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Lucy Frazer)
Mr Speaker, may I share in your remarks about PC Palmer and pay tribute to him and his work in this House?
As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on debt and personal finance, the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) is campaigning hard on this important issue, and she is right that bailiffs are not operating as they should in some areas. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) and her constituents, the Rogers family, who sadly lost Jerome as a result of and following some action by bailiffs. We intend to launch a call for evidence shortly to evaluate our most recent bailiff reforms.
Yvonne Fovargue
I, too, met the family of Jerome Rogers, and I pay tribute to them for their courage in taking the campaign forward. However, Jerome’s case perfectly highlights why the industry needs regulating, because his problems were just the tip of an iceberg. Citizens Advice helped 41,000 people with 90,000 bailiff issues last year—one person every three minutes. The call for evidence relates to rogue bailiffs, but this is not just about one or two wayward individuals; the whole system is rotten. Will the Minister consider the need for an independent body to regulate and police the industry properly?