Lord Hain
Main Page: Lord Hain (Labour - Life peer)(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on the eloquence with which she is advancing her case. Is she aware that the proposal has cast a big shadow of uncertainty and job insecurity over the staff of the organisation, some of whom work in my constituency, which is nearby, and that when Tesco recently advertised for staff to open a local store in nearby Briton Ferry, 15 posts attracted 600 applicants? These are communities of very high unemployment, and job insecurity is therefore a big problem in the area.
Mrs James
It is. I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The Land Registry jobs are quality, well paid and well respected posts, and it is very important that we retain them in a mixed economy and give job opportunities and a way forward to people from all sorts of backgrounds. I am very loth to lose one job, of any type or description, from my constituency when, as he has just pointed out, they are all very important.
Have the Government failed to notice that the Land Registry has a customer satisfaction rating of 98%—a rating that many large-scale, international and well known organisations would love to have—that it operates at no cost to the taxpayer and that it made £98.8 million last year for the Treasury? That was used to reduce fees and to invest back into our everyday lives. Why is the Minister not standing up and congratulating that organisation on its effectiveness rather than swinging the sword of Damocles over its head?
The service users—every person in the UK who owns property—need a reliable, low-cost and secure land registration service that also guards against the ever-increasing crime of property fraud. Nothing in the current proposal provides any evidence that moving to a commercial model will improve the existing service, so I ask again: why mend what is not broken? The talk is rhetorical.