Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Third sitting)

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Does anyone have anything to add? Do not feel that you have to; I am not putting you on the spot.

Ms Paula Higgins: There is one thing I would add. I am so pleased that Sue is here; she has done amazing work on shared ownership. I am not a legal expert, but I wonder whether you will be hearing from people from the retirement housing sector as well. That is a very complicated form of tenure, with exit fees and whatnot. Can they actually have the same rights to challenge fees and things like that? I am not sure if that is covered in some of your evidence sessions, but retirement housing is notoriously known for quite scandalous fees and charges.

Bob Smytherman: Certainly, we have seen a massive increase in shared ownership memberships coming to us for membership of residents’ associations. Obviously, we are helping them through that. In terms of quick wins, I really hope the Government will finally implement an independent statutory regulator for property managers. That would be a really quick win to help leaseholders. It is very disappointing that we have not got there yet, so I really hope there will be an independent regulator for these management companies that hold large amounts of leaseholders’ money.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Q Ms Phillips, shared owners, under the Renters (Reform) Bill passing through Parliament, will get forfeiture: an improvement on mandatory grounds of possession for which relief cannot be sought in the court. Do you support, in this Bill, the right to abolish forfeiture? At the moment, I believe a shared owner has less security of tenure than a private leaseholder. Perhaps you could explain what, for example, a housing association that owns the other part of a shared ownership apartment can do to someone in circumstances where there is a dispute over a service charge and non-payment?

Sue Phillips: One of the things I would want from this Bill is for shared owners to have all the rights that other leaseholders have. Of course, as your question flags up, they face problems over and beyond the problems faced by leaseholders. The problem for shared owners is that if they—I will not speak to the specific technicalities of this—fall behind with payments, they are liable to possession with no reimbursement of the equity they have invested in their property. This is because they sit more as a tenant than as a homeowner. I would certainly like to see that addressed.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q It really is an equity trap, isn’t it?

Sue Phillips: It is. Housing associations will say that they will do their utmost to prevent this scenario playing out, and that numbers are low. While that may be true, I do not think it is an argument against shared owners having the same protections in law as other leaseholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q If the Bill were to introduce a provision that forfeiture were abolished, so that with a debt of, say, £5,000 or £10,000, you could not lose the entire value that you have in the property as a leaseholder, should that right similarly apply to shared ownership leaseholders?

Sue Phillips: Shared owners should have the same right as other leaseholders and they should not be liable to lose their investment in their home due to a relatively small debt—absolutely.

I would add that it is a hugely important issue, but it is probably an issue that affects a fairly small minority of people at the moment and that there are other issues arising from this reform process that affect a great many more shared owners or all shared owners. It is an important issue, but I would not like for it to take up a disproportionate amount of time in this session.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Okay. As shared owners, you pay service charges as well as rent and you are disadvantaged if there is poor maintenance of your buildings. Do you agree that shared owners should be allowed to claim the right to manage, as confirmed in the recent Canary Gateway case?

Sue Phillips: My expertise does not lie so much with right-to-manage claims; what I would reiterate is that they should have the same rights as any other leaseholder.

What is more important—what is specific to shared owners—is that they are liable for 100% of the costs of repair and maintenance, and I think there are two separate issues within that. One is the issue relating to the model. In previous sessions—

[Barry Gardiner]

Sorry, I couldn’t hear what you said there.

Sue Phillips: Sorry. One is to do with the model and one is to do with the transparency around the model. On the model itself, in the previous sessions on Tuesday people talked about the unfairness of generating income streams from leaseholders after the profit made on the sale of the initial share, and I think that the 100% liability for service charges that shared owners have falls within those kinds of questions. It should certainly be looked at to see whether it is proportionate for shared owners to pay 100% of charges. Again, there is a great deal more that I could say, but I am aware of the limits on time.

The second issue is transparency. In evidence submitted to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee inquiry into shared ownership, one of the themes that has come out of the published responses from shared owners is that people do not seem to be aware at the point of sale of their liabilities in this respect. Therefore, if we cannot tackle that 100% liability in this Bill, given time constraints, at the very least regulators should pay more attention to the nature of marketing and whether it is fair, transparent and compliant with consumer protection regulations.

You asked me earlier for a quick fix. I certainly have a quick fix around transparency and it is that the relevant regulators should look more closely at transparency about the model as it stands, up until we have meaningful reform of the areas that are problematic.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In conversation with my colleague, Matt Pennycook, you talked about the lack of statutory lease extension provision. The Law Commission said that shared owners should have the right to extend. Do you consider that that would be a welcome amendment to the Bill?

Sue Phillips: I think it is essential, and this relates to the marketing that I have talked about. Shared owners come into shared ownership believing that they are a leaseholder like any other leaseholder; they have no reason to think differently. Often, there is a caveat emptor attitude and I think that is reprehensible, to be honest, when you are talking about provision of social housing to households that by definition are financially vulnerable compared with people who can afford to buy outright. It is not a failure of their due diligence; it is a failure of the Government, the housing sector and their agencies to spell out the difference between assured tenancy and leasehold.

There is a moral compass argument that they should have the statutory right to lease extension, because of the manner in which they have been sold those short leases. I think there are separate debates to be had about whether 99-year leases were mis-sold. A recent ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority outlined that it is likely to be misleading not to provide material information about the costs of lease extension. That suggests that there certainly is an argument that those short leases have been mis-sold.

We cannot change that. Most of those shared owners will be outside any scope of limitations for redress. The least we can do is ensure that lease extension is available not only to future buyers, but current shared owners, who have been left with a lease that does not actually give this right. Can they afford to take up the right? They should have a right to lease extension, but that right should be made affordable. If you are sitting there with a 50, 60 or 70-year lease, even if you have got that right to statutory lease extension, it might not be affordable to take up that right. So there is a basketful of issues to look at here, and I encourage collaboration with other regulators and with the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee to resolve those other issues.

[The Chair]

Just one last question, Barry, because I want to get other people in. I might have the time to come back to you if you have more, but—

[Barry Gardiner]

No, I will leave it there.

[Andy Carter]

Q Paula, your organisation, the HomeOwners Alliance, has described the Bill as a huge missed opportunity, because including flats in the changes was not done in this Bill. Would you like to elaborate a bit on that?

Ms Paula Higgins: I feel strongly about that. This is really going to be a missed opportunity. These types of Bills will come once every 20 years, so you must finish the job that you start. We saw that in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, where we had the commonhold and it did not happen. If we cannot get commonhold sorted, why do we not have all flats being built having to be share of freehold—having to be sold share of freehold within five years—and have a sunset clause saying that there will be no new leasehold flats after a certain time? If you do not do it now, the next opportunity is not going to arise. I feel very strongly. We have lots of people who are waiting. We have people coming to us every day saying, “I am waiting for my lease extension. The Government are going to do something about it.” We have been waiting for years; we put out our report in 2017 showing that 43% of leaseholders did not even know how much time was left on their lease. They are not expected to be experts in this; they are buying a flat to live in. So it is a real missed opportunity if we do not do something on this and it will come back to bite us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

Q When you say “regulated”, do you mean they should have a qualification—that they can tick a box to say, “I was qualified to do this”—or redress, as in, there is a regulatory body above them?

Ms Paula Higgins: That is a really good point. I know the RoPA stuff—the regulation of property agents working group; in fact, we gave evidence to it. A tick box is probably not the right thing. Perhaps it is more about a proper single place for redress, but as I think Andrew Bulmer mentioned, that is the ambulance at the bottom, and what matters is what is at the top.

What we don’t want is people doing online qualifications and getting a tick, and then they can jump up as an estate agent and come back down again. So I appreciate the complexities and I look forward to seeing what your deliberations will be.

Sue Phillips: I do not have the expertise to speak directly to the regulation of property management, but I would like to pick up on a couple of related issues from a shared-ownership perspective. The first is that the evidence submitted to the Advertising Standards Authority’s inquiry into Black Friday marketing highlighted the fact that industry sector standards for the marketing of shared ownership are lower than other standards that are out there. For example, shared ownership is currently excluded from the New Homes Quality Board’s code of practice. That simultaneously reflects the complexity of shared ownership but also the fact that shared owners do not have access to the same level of protections as other homebuyers in relation to new build codes. That is slightly off to one side.

I also wanted to pick up on the matter of transparency of service charges. Transparency is clearly essential: people should know what they are paying for. However, shared owners and other leaseholders should not have to effectively take on an audit function where it falls upon them to scrutinise accounts. They should be able to place some degree of reliance on the accuracy and proportionality of the accounts that they receive. I cannot speak to how that will be achieved, but I think that the onus should be on the providers of services and service charge accounts to be better, rather than leaseholders and shared owners having more and more obligations to scrutinise and take whatever action is required if problems are identified in those accounts.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Ms Higgins, do you agree that it would be appropriate to allow leaseholders to withhold service charges where there has not been compliance with the very extensive requirements in the Bill to provide accounts no later than six months after, and so on? Is that an appropriate and proportionate way for leaseholders to be permitted to respond?

Ms Paula Higgins: I fully agree with that. It is a bit like the situation where, if you are getting building work done in your home and the building work is not completed or whatever, you withhold money. That happens in all of the construction industry. The stuff in relation to the forfeiture is very disproportionate, is it not?

[Barry Gardiner]

Indeed, yes.

Ms Paula Higgins: I fully support something like that.

[The Chair]

This needs to be very brief.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you also for what you said about wanting all new apartments to be leasehold with a share of freehold, Ms Higgins. That was echoed by Mr Smytherman.

In so far as new apartments are going to have a share of freehold, Mr Smytherman, you indicated that you felt that you had got the best of both worlds as a director of a freehold franchise company.

Bob Smytherman: Yes. Ours is a tripartite lease. A ground freeholder owns the land and there is a separate middle lease, which is the limited company—limited by shares—of which we are shareholders.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q As a leaseholder with a share of freehold, if commonhold were to become available, do you think that it would be equitable and fair to charge you for the privilege of transferring to commonhold, or do you think that more people would take the opportunity to transfer to commonhold if that came?

[The Chair]

A one-word answer, please, because I have to get to the end.

Bob Smytherman: That is difficult. It depends. If you have a difficult freeholder, then that would clearly be an advantageous thing to do. Then there is a scenario like ours, where you have a democratic limited company with shareholders.

Sorry, I cannot do a one-word answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q Professor Steven, do you have anything to add?

Professor Steven: No, I agree with my colleague. From a Scottish perspective, I would be more in favour of commonhold.

[Barry Gardiner]

Professor Steven, my question is to you. Last week, in the House of Lords, the Government indicated that they were looking at the Scottish system of tenements. Could you perhaps explain that to the Committee? My understanding is that the Scottish Law Commission has been looking to review tenement structure and actually make it more like commonhold. Is it correct that there is a lack of standardisation and no ability to ensure those share costs are split proportionately under the tenement structure, and therefore that would not be a quick cut-and-paste for the Government if they are considering what to move forward to?

Professor Steven: Yes, I absolutely agree. The legislation in Scotland is the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004, which is 20 years old and is fairly basic. It does not have owners associations, for example, so it is less sophisticated than the commonhold proposals that the Law Commission for England and Wales made. But we have problems in Scotland too. There are always problems, no matter what the law says.

There are two particular problems. The first is where money comes from to make repairs to flatted properties—we typically call them tenements in Scotland. The second, sadly, is apathy. I was watching the earlier session, and I saw how engaged your witness in Worthing was, but sadly in other cases the owners are not so engaged. Even if you have an owners association regime, which the Scottish Law Commission is now looking at, it still depends on people being engaged. There are no easy solutions. I favour commonhold, but it will not be a magic wand.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Nothing takes away the capacity of people to disagree with each other. I want to ask you a further question, which Professor Hodges may also have a view on. In the early 2000s in Scotland, the Government did away with feu duty in one fell swoop. You got rid of the inefficiencies of that system. Is it not unfair that we are going through all these inefficient qualifying criteria to ensure that enfranchisement happens only on a development-by-development basis? Could we not do this in one fell swoop in England too? I see Professor Hodges is smiling from ear to ear, but I will allow you to come in first, Professor Steven.

Professor Steven: As a former law commissioner in Scotland, I am reluctant to disagree with the Law Commission for England and Wales, given the amount of work it has done on this. It is clearly very complicated.

You said that we got rid of our feudal system in one fell swoop in 2004. That is broadly true, but in 1974—50 years ago—we banned new feudal payments, which are like ground rents. There was a system whereby the existing feudal payments had to be paid off when the property was sold, so by 2004 there was not much left. My impression is that in England there is quite a lot left, in terms of ground rents. Because there was not so much left in Scotland, the compensation issues and the European convention on human rights issues that Dr Maxwell spoke about on Tuesday were not so prominent. Although we had the feudal system till 2004, it was a shell of what it originally was. In a certain way, it would be much simpler just to change leasehold into commonhold, but I fear that it would lead to all sorts of unforeseen consequences.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Just to make you feel a little better about disagreeing with your Law Commission counterparts in England, of course they were constrained in what they could do by the parameters the Government set them.

Professor Hodges: Very briefly: modernise, because we are still living in the past; simplify, because we can easily do that on a comprehensive basis; and get it done so that people can plan, retrain and know what they have to do. You then get good behaviour throughout the system. I am very tempted to repeat facetiously the “Get it done” slogan, which crops up a lot.

[Richard Fuller]

Q My questions are for Professor Hodges. We have to deal with the Bill as it is—on the commonhold thing—so, “Get it done” is not particularly helpful, if I may say. It might be a good indication, but not particularly detailed, so help us on the detail of that. Often in Parliament, we regulate and think that that is the solution. I do not know whether you have had a chance to look at some of the regulatory details in the Bill, but what would be your guidance be to us about where it is pointing in the right direction, where it might be going wrong, and the pitfalls that we should look out for?

Professor Hodges: As far as the detail of the Bill is concerned, looking technically at what is in there without expressing a view as whether it is a good or a bad idea substantively, it seems to me to be fine. You asked a wider regulatory question earlier on—

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q To be clear, I agree with you on managing agents; I am talking about the regulation of private estates. The Bill provides for a new regulatory regime for private estates, which are not currently regulated. It is separate from the service charge regime. I am just wondering whether your simplification point works in this case too.

Professor Hodges: Everyone should be in and under the same regime—absolutely everyone in the system.

Professor Steven: I do not have a strong view on this.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Professor Hodges, my colleague Richard Fuller sought to make a point about caveat emptor to you. Is it your experience that the inequity of power and information between developers or freeholders and the potential purchaser—the leaseholder—is so great that caveat emptor is inappropriate and that you need the power of regulation to sort out that inequity? I think it was the Law Commission that concluded that

“any financial gain for the landlord”—

or freeholder—

“will be at the expense of the leaseholder…Their interests are diametrically opposed, and consensus will be impossible to achieve.”

Professor Hodges: In any consumer or property—certainly social housing—dispute system, there is an obvious imbalance of power. People do not have the money to do things. I have chaired the Post Office Horizon compensation board advising Ministers in the past few weeks. The whole reason why Parliament needs to step in is to correct a massive imbalance of power. Private litigation did not work, or it only half worked. There have been many stories about people being traumatised, and not just unable to enforce their rights. That is why we have invented things like legal aid, Citizens Advice and an ombudsman, and we are still moving—we are still improving that one—because of the ongoing imbalance of power between the little people and larger organisations.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Indeed. Thank you for that, and I think everyone will also want to thank you for your work on the Post Office inquiry.

I want to ask you about introducing insurance commission. I do not know whether you heard what the witnesses said on Tuesday, but you may know of the Canary Riverside case, in which £1.6 million in commission was given to a freeholder by the insurer—in a kickback—which was deemed to be inadmissible, and that is what the tribunal, mercifully, found. Although the Bill is outlawing commission, it is introducing fees for insurance services. In the Canary Riverside case, that is precisely what that £1.6 million was called. Do you fear that the Bill appears to dispense with commission, but actually reintroduces it by the back door?

Professor Hodges: Possibly, but that is why you need regulation. That is an obvious example of an imbalance of power and lack of transparency, for which you need external people to get involved. Exactly what the final result ought to be, I would leave to a regulator—for them to say that so much commission is either allowable or not allowable, or indeed not at all. It depends on the circumstances.

[Barry Gardiner]

We will hear about—

[The Chair]

Can I just interject and ask whether Professor Steven has anything to add to what you have asked so far?

Professor Steven: Very briefly, insurance law is UK-wide, but in Scotland insurance of blocks would normally be handled by managing agents because we do not have the freeholder. Since 2011, we have had legislation in Scotland that regulates managing agents. I know that that is being considered in England as well, but that might be of interest.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Thank you very much, Professor Steven.

Turning to the value of the building and property rights, we heard from an eminent lawyer on Tuesday about property rights in relation to ground rent. Looking at enfranchisement, I think it was the Residential Freehold Association, which is charged with guarding the property rights of freeholders, that said that their share in the value of the building was only 2.5%. The corollary of that, of course, is that the leaseholders’ share in the value of the building is 97.5%. Do you feel that the way in which the costs of enfranchisement look at the total value of the building is therefore unjust?

[The Chair]

We have less than a minute left.

Professor Hodges: I would need to know an awful lot more to be able to answer that question, as a non-property expert. It is a very interesting question, and my answer would be that it is one for Parliament and the regulatory system to engage with.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you very much. Professor Steven?

Professor Steven: I have nothing to add.

[The Chair]

I thank the two witnesses for taking the time to give evidence to us today. Thank you for beaming in, Professor Steven, and thank you for attending, Professor Hodges. We will now move to our next witness—Paul Broadhead, come on down.

Examination of Witness

Paul Broadhead gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

They can be far more punitive.

Paul Broadhead: They can be, absolutely, with where RPI is. It is really difficult to predict. Some ground rents can grow very rapidly, which puts people in financial difficulty. From the lenders’ perspective, when underwriting a mortgage, they need to consider whether the mortgage is affordable on the face of it not only today, but in the future, and to take account of any foreseeable increases in expenditure. That is one of the areas they will take into account.

In terms of the peppercorn ground rent, yes, I do believe that that will resolve this going forward. The important thing to consider is that there is still a separate consultation, which just closed yesterday, on capping ground rent for existing leaseholders. It is really important that that is brought forward to prevent this two-tier system from developing.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Mr Broadhead, I do not know how long you have been working in your present capacity, but I suspect it is since 1984. In 1984, your organisation’s report “Leaseholds—Time for a change?” said that the “leasehold system is incompatible with home ownership” and that an Englishman’s leasehold home “is his landlord’s castle”. I thought that was a very elegant way of expressing what many of us think. Is that still your organisation’s view?

Paul Broadhead: You are absolutely right. We have been advocating for the reform of leasehold since 1984. As you kindly point out, it was not me that made that comment at the time.

[Barry Gardiner]

That elegant comment.

Paul Broadhead: Absolutely—I wish I could be as elegant, and I will try to be throughout this questioning. Our position is that leasehold does require reform. If you were going to design the property tenure today, it is not what you would come up with. However, there are 4 million-plus leasehold properties in this country. Undoing that and replacing it overnight with a new, perhaps more just, system will take time.

The first thing we need to concentrate on is reform, to make the system fair, predictable and equitable, so that people have the security of owner-occupation. In a sense, yes, they do not own the land on which their home sits, but they have the security of tenure that they would not have in other sectors. But it is important that we ensure that that is fair.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Let me ask you perhaps a more difficult question: how many of the mortgages that are lent to shared equity owners default compared with normal freehold owners?

Paul Broadhead: Are you talking particularly about shared equity or shared ownership?

[Barry Gardiner]

Sorry, shared ownership—where you have shared ownership in the property.

Paul Broadhead: I have not got those figures to hand, but we can certainly send those through to the Committee. From speaking to our membership, I think it is fairly comparable. Our sector punches above its weight in shared ownership because it is very keen on affordable housing, and we have some big shared-ownership lenders. One thing I would say about shared ownership is that underwriting and managing those cases are slightly different from managing a traditional mortgage, because you have the housing association interest and some potential staircasing—although, of course, many do not. The arrears levels tend to be higher, but the default levels, I think, are comparable. We can confirm that in writing.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q Interesting. Why do you think the arrears levels tend to be higher?

Paul Broadhead: There are two things. One is the housing association rent aspect. Affordability tends to be more stretched by people owning shared ownership properties in any event, as most people land in shared ownership as an intermediate tenure because they are not able to buy their whole home. That, therefore, means their incomes are often less predictable. They do not necessarily always understand—

[Barry Gardiner]

Or that property prices are too high, of course.

Paul Broadhead: Well, property prices are too high irrespective of tenure, even if you are buying as a freeholder.

[Barry Gardiner]

Their income may be stable and reasonable—being in shared ownership does not mean that your income is unstable in any way.

Paul Broadhead: No, not at all.

[Andy Carter]

Q I want to pick up on some of the comments we heard on Tuesday around mis-selling. You mentioned the work the building societies—your members—would do to understand the affordability and the ability of a purchaser. What steps do your members go through to ensure that the person taking out the mortgage fully understands what they are buying? I am conscious that you will not necessarily always know all the things that they know. Could you just talk us through that area?

Paul Broadhead: Certainly. The first thing to remember is that mortgage lenders are experts in mortgage lending, not in property law—it is down to the conveyancer to advise the borrower of the requirements of the lease and the purchase of the property they are buying. The way I would describe it is that the conveyancer and the surveyor, to an extent, are the lender’s eyes and ears on the ground to ensure all of that is clear to the borrower, and that they are entering into that transaction with their eyes open.

What we have seen from a mortgage lender’s perspective, particularly when the escalating ground rent issue started to come to a head, was lenders taking a much more proactive approach on new developments to understand the terms of some of those leases, and actually refusing to lend on those new developments. Of course, there are a whole range of mortgage lenders that will lend on a new development, but the fact is that a new development without some of those large lenders—because they will not lend against that leasehold—drives change. That is what we have seen. We have seen the effect of that with the escalating ground rent—with the reduction of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Rowley]

I am not sure that I would accept that, but I will take that up with you and your members separately.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q I will pick up briefly on what you said to Mr Carter about the way in which sometimes your members were advising people, “Actually, this is leasehold, and there are these additional costs, and service charges are so expensive that we are not prepared to lend to you.” Are there any particular freeholders who have a reputation in the industry for doing that? I am thinking of people such as the Freshwater or Persimmon Homes, or any who seem to be known for their excessive service charges. Is there an automatic flag for them in the industry? Sitting where you are, you would have parliamentary privilege to name them.

Paul Broadhead: Parliamentary privilege notwithstanding, no, we do not have individual organisations I could point to. I certainly do not get reports from my members.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q In that case, my question to you is: why not? You know very well that there are “fleeceholders” out there: freeholders who fleece their leaseholders. They have a reputation for doing it over many, many years. Should your industry not be advising somebody who approaches you for a mortgage about that, when you know full well that if they have a mortgage with that particular freeholder, the likelihood is that over the years those services charges will rack up and be abused in precisely the way that we have talked about with previous witnesses, about the inequity of power in this relationship? Indeed, these are the very issues that we are seeking to amend in this Bill. Why does your association not have those flags so that when it sees names such as Freshwater, it says to the person, “Look, we need to tell you a thing or two here”?

Paul Broadhead: In terms of coming back to me as an association, that is a level of detail that is about individual organisations. It is not really part of my role to represent that. That does not mean they ignore that, just to be clear.

[Barry Gardiner]

Q But you rightly said, Mr Broadhead, that your members would advise a prospective purchaser not to engage in a mortgage where it was leasehold, if they felt that the service charges would rack up and they would then be put into financial penury. Why do you not do it when you know that it will be the case?

Paul Broadhead: Our members will not advise; they will refuse that mortgage, because it does not meet with their policy. In terms of other service charges, they all have a panel of conveyancers that they approve to act for them, and that is for the consumer purchasing that property. The terms of those panels change as some of these practices have come to light, and they will be nipped in the bud at that point.

[The Chair]

Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions and, indeed, for this morning’s sitting. I thank all our witnesses on behalf of the Committee for their evidence. The Committee will meet again at 2 pm this afternoon here in the Boothroyd Room to continue taking oral evidence.