Peter Bottomley
Main Page: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West)Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Peter Bottomley Excerpts
Jo Swinson
I want to make a little progress, because I am conscious of time.
Amendments 38 and 39 focus on health and safety. Addressing the concerns about strict liability for breach of health and safety duties is an important element of the Government’s wider reforms to tackle both the perception of a compensation culture and the damaging effect it has on sensible health and safety management and business growth—concerns consistently reported by businesses.
As was outlined on Report, the purpose of this reform is to establish the important principle that a responsible employer should not be liable to a civil claim for compensation where they have taken all reasonable steps and have not been negligent. The substantive law is unaffected. Criminal offences and their enforcement will not be affected, and employees will continue to have the right to bring claims for compensation where they can prove their employer has been negligent.
The Government do not believe that it is justifiable to hold employers liable for incidents outside of their control that they could not have reasonably prevented. The modern framework of law and supporting evidence and guidance means that employees are in a much better position than they have been historically to demonstrate whether their employer is at fault, and that will remain relevant as evidence in assessing what employers should have known and whether an employer’s behaviour was reasonable. That reform will mean that in future there will be a consistent approach to civil litigation across all health and safety legislation. This is simpler for all to understand and will therefore have a greater impact in increasing employers’ confidence to do the right things to protect their employees and to develop and grow their business.
We have proposed an amendment in lieu of amendment 38 and proposed that the House should agree with the other place in its amendment 39, which, as well as reinstating the main provision, would also reintroduce amendments agreed in Grand Committee in response to points raised by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. The Committee took the view that a power to extend the policy to wider health and safety legislation was too wide, and the Government have agreed to remove it.
I shall now turn to letting and managing agents. Many letting agents act lawfully and provide a good service, but there is a minority whose service quality is unacceptable—no doubt Members on both sides of the House have heard tales from their constituents where this has been the case. Consumer protection legislation covers many of the problematic practices, but enforcement is patchy, particularly in less serious cases. Also, existing legislation does not give consumers direct access to redress.
The noble Lady Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town said in the other place that her amendment simply required agents to sign up to a redress scheme. In response, this Government amendment gives the Secretary of State the power to make an order requiring letting and managing agents of privately rented and residential leasehold homes to belong to a redress scheme. The Government will consult on the detail, taking into account the recommendations of the Communities and Local Government Committee Select Committee and the Office of Fair Trading.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I look forward, if I can, to contributing to this debate later. In the consultation, will the Government consider setting minimum standards, adopting other codes, such as the code for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors? Will the consultation also include disciplinary procedures and will there be an improvement to the protection of leaseholder funds?
Jo Swinson
I know that the hon. Gentleman has tabled amendments and is keen to press the Government on these issues. It is important that consumers have access to redress where letting and managing agents do not act as they should. Obviously, the specifics of the consultation have not yet been drawn up, but I am sure that, through Hansard, his suggestions will be well-received. I know that the Minister for Housing, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), will be happy to meet him to discuss his concerns in more detail in order to ensure that we get this right. Taking this power in the Bill will give us an opportunity to ensure that we get the details right. I hope I can reassure him, however, when I say that my hon. Friend the Minister for Housing is keen to ensure that we make speedy progress, while still getting the details right.
Sir Peter Bottomley
The issue of caste was very well covered yesterday on the BBC’s “Newsnight” programme, and I hope the Government will take up the suggestion that there should be discussion over the next few days about how the points made can be incorporated into the aim to get fairness. My reaction on watching people describe what it was like to be told by someone junior to them that they should not take orders from them because of something that happened in their family past was that that was ludicrous.
Ghandi called the untouchables the children of God over 70 years ago—in the 1930s, I think—and we ought to find some way of picking that up and echoing it in our country.
I could speak on a number of issues, but I will stick to the issue of agents, and in particular leasehold managing agents. I hope that when the Select Committee looks at this, it will address not only the letting of residential tenancies but the 3 million leaseholds in this country, many of which are held by people who are old, frail and on fixed incomes. My hon. Friend the Minister may be right to say that the majority of managing agents behave well. In the past, however, many of them, and especially those who were associated with the freeholder, ripped off their leaseholders left, right and centre. Such agents are a minority, but they hold the majority of the responsibility for managing leasehold properties, and the faster they are brought out into transparency and openness, the better.
I pay tribute to the Minister for Housing. Through his efforts and the co-operation of his colleagues, the Government have come forward with a welcome initiative. I am not arguing it is completely right—I would be surprised if it were—but its 10 measures deal with a variety of issues, the most important of which is openness.
Having a redress scheme requires having a code. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has a good code, as do some of the associations of letting agents. This explains why most people have argued for licensing, which would include an ombudsman service and a redress system. As things stand, we are going to get the redress system, but we are not necessarily going to get the code.
I hope Ministers, either in this place or the other place, can assure the Houses of Parliament that they agree that having redress requires having a code, and that managing agents will not be able to practice if they have been struck off or cannot give adequate assurances that they meet the code and will abide by decisions if they are held to have offended against it.
Ordinary disputes are one thing. I ought to declare that I have an interest in a small leasehold flat—I am now a freeholder—and our managing agent and freeholder behaved impeccably with the six leaseholders. I have no complaint about that at all. I have taken advantage of the present system, but many people have not.
In Oakland court in my constituency, a group of really old people took action against their freeholder as they were being charged for a warden’s flat when there was no warden. Eventually, when they could get to the leasehold valuation tribunal, there was an effective judgment that would have given back to them—although sadly many of them had died—not only tens of thousands of pounds but possibly £100,000. Eventually, they came to a settlement and I pay tribute to the freeholders for doing that.
To have clever lawyers, some of whom will appear at LEASE—the Government-approved agency for giving advice on leaseholds—advise managing agents on what can be done with leaseholders within the law does not strike me as balanced. I ask the Government to ask LEASE to ensure that at least one of the two people I will name is invited to join its board. One is Sebastian O’Kelly, who runs the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, and the other is Martin Boyd.
Martin Boyd got involved because he was one of the leaseholders who took on the Tchenguiz brothers. It is not for me to get involved with whatever happened, right or wrong, with the Tchenguiz brothers, the action to which they were subject and the separate action that they are now taking—although I would have thought that a handshake and an apology would solve that. I am saying, however, that the Tchenguiz brothers do not have the best reputation for how they deal with leaseholders. Sometimes, they appear to charge rather high sums if someone wants to sublet a leasehold property and sometimes they want to sell it. A whole series of other issues should, I believe, be fully examined under parliamentary privilege.
It seems to me that officials in the Departments involved have had to work really hard to produce the five pages of new clauses that we are discussing, so I shall not add to their burdens by trying to go through them in detail.
The permanent secretaries at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Ministry of Justice have a responsibility to add to the numbers of people involved, because Parliament will ensure that the issue gets proper attention—not just the 9 million tenancies, but the 3 million leaseholders. That will require serious effort in Government and by Parliament and I hope that in time the injustices that are rampant will have evaporated, partly through transparency and partly through legislative action.
Let me give an example of transparency. I challenge every managing agent to tell every leaseholder now what commission the freeholder is getting on the insurance premiums to cover the value of the properties. Those commissions go up to 65%. In my view, they should not be more than about 5% or 10%. Let us get that out in the open, and we will get the rest of the muck out afterwards.
Mrs McGuire
I want to make a few remarks about the abolition of the general duty.
It is sad that we are repealing the general duty under the Equality Act 2006. It was not plucked out of mid-air and something that the then Government suddenly decided to put into an Act of Parliament. Progress towards the Act was long and conciliatory and it worked for this Parliament and organisations outside it, yet under the guise of deregulation we are seeing the undoing of many years’ work, much consensus and much acceptance that the general duty laid out a set of values and principles for the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
I find it doubly sad that the Minister, who has apparently built up a reputation as a champion of equality, is having to justify this proposal today. The general duty sets out a unifying vision for society, which the EHRC must work towards. I find it disappointing that she dismissed the idea that aspiration could sit comfortably with some of the other specific duties of the EHRC. Unlike the Minister, I think that the general duty is fundamental to how the EHRC operates. It sets out the guiding principles and values of the EHRC. It had cross-party support and I suspect that if I checked the voting record of the Minister, I would probably find that she wholeheartedly supported that general duty in 2006, as did her party. Seven years on, what was achieved by working with her party and members of the other party in the coalition is dismissed as a burden on us all.