Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Third sitting)

Richard Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We have just over 10 minutes left. I will bring in Richard Fuller and then we will try to get back to Barry and Andy.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Q We have been talking a bit about regulation, which is often seen as some sort of answer to problems and frequently is not—or, at least, is different from simplification or standardisation, which each of you have mentioned at different points.

I am interested in your thoughts when it comes to property managers and managing agents, about where you think the interaction is between simplification and regulation, and whether regulation is a matter of regulating the process—“You must provide this set of information by this date”—or of regulating the people—“Thou must have this qualification in order to do x”—or whether it is about the process of redress: being able to get some compensation at the end; because we are going to be wrestling with all those things here. They all have a role to play, to a greater or lesser extent. But we run the risk of just vomiting out a whole new set of what we think is going to be the solution. As you said, Ms Higgins, we have a once-in-20-years chance. I said this to Mr Gardiner on the way in—he goes back to 1993 thinking about this, and he is an MP now.

What are your thoughts? Give us some guidance on simplification and standardisation versus regulation, and then regulation of people, regulation of process and the provision of redress.

Bob Smytherman: I would not reinvent the wheel. I don’t know whether you have had The Property Institute in yet, and Andrew Bulmer from the Association of Residential Managing Agents. They fill the gap as the main membership organisation for managing agents. Andrew will give you the figures, but I believe they represent about 50% of all property managers of leasehold property. That means that 50% of people are not members of ARMA and are not part of their regime, along with the Institute of Residential Property Management—obviously, ARMA and the IRPM have now merged to form The Property Institute.

They have done amazing work to fill the void, where there has been a lack of an independent regulator, and I think working with Andrew and with them would be a really good starting point for the Government to create a regulatory regime. Certainly we would stand ready as an organisation to help with that. I just think that giving leaseholders the confidence that there is an independent body that they can go to when they have disputes with their property manager or their landlord is really important—as people do with Ofwat or Ofgem or other regulators. Having that independent regulator is really, really important.

Ms Paula Higgins: You make a really interesting point, but there are things that I would not want to see happening. We also work in the new homes area. We have legislated for a New Homes Ombudsman—fantastic—but we have not enacted it yet, and we now have a more confusing landscape for people who are buying new homes, who are probably also leaseholders and probably also shared owners; they have another competing code. It is incredibly confusing. That is not what I want to see happening.

Regulation means enforcement. There are a lot of things that estate agents have to do now, and we know from our research that they are not doing what they should be doing. The problem is that people do not have the right of redress if something happens. We have heard about the managing agents, but it is the estate agents, the developers and the housing associations who are selling these dreams. You have seen lots of people on Tuesday who feel they have been mis-sold, and others will continue to be mis-sold. These estate agents are the first port of call for the people going into the process, and we have to remember that people are buying a home, and they have not done it before. They might have bought a couch or something like that, but this is the first time they are doing this, and they can get it so wrong. People need to be protected. The estate agent is the only part of the professional world of property that is not regulated. The estate agent is that person there who is alongside the person trying to get their dream, which could go massively wrong.

[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?

--- Later in debate ---

[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—

[Richard Fuller]

I will come to that in a minute. But just in here, on this Bill, is there anything that we should look out for?

Professor Hodges: As far as the detail is concerned, there is nothing that stands out to me, as a regulatory expert, that says, “This is a problem”.

[Richard Fuller]

Okay, so more generally then, on regulators—Ofgem on energy prices and Ofwat on sewage and water—that approach seems not to provide the outcomes that perhaps were originally indicated when the legislation was passed. What are your thoughts about the political use of regulation? Is there anything from those general principles that you think might apply here?

Professor Hodges: I sat on Lord Best’s RoPA—regulation of property agents—working group, and there was strong consensus around the room that you need regulation of agents. Since then, how we do regulation has evolved. Regulation, in the broadest sense, is an all-encompassing idea, and looking at the problems with Ofgem, Ofwat and so on, there are two aspects that strike me. First, one historically gave specific regulatory bodies certain remits that turned out to be not wide enough, and there were not enough people involved in the conversation; they were not regulated or contributing to good behaviour.

Secondly, the traditional way within which regulation is thought of, in the way that Parliament works, is that you make a number of requirements, rules and procedures. You then identify breaches of those rules and requirements and you then enforce. You can do that through traditionally public or private ways. Public ways in the property sector would be through trading standards authorities or environmental health locally, not a national regulator, as such. The private ways would be through the courts, but that has evolved in relation to the alternative dispute resolution ombudsmen being the best model at the moment and an integration between the tribunal and ombudsman, which is on the cards and may well occur. However, that is not enough because enforcement does not affect behaviour as such. We like to think that it does, but it is a myth, and there is an enormous amount of psychology and evidence published showing that it is not enough.

Therefore, if one stands back and says, “How do we get an effective regulatory system?”, it is about how one does it. That involves getting all the stakeholders together —again, that goes back to the first point about how it is not just a regulator telling people what to do, like an Ofgem or Ofcom—and saying, “How are we going to behave and how are we going to do it?” You need the rules, but you also need codes and systems involving data and support.

[Richard Fuller]

Rules, codes, systems, data, penalties, redress, different organisations—this is your answer as a better solution to caveat emptor?

Professor Hodges: Yes, absolutely. Now, let me give you one example only—

[Richard Fuller]

In all circumstances or specifically on this Bill? Well, we ought to stick to the Bill. I just want to be clear: you have just outlined the solution—this Bill is going part of the way to that—but the old way was, “I have personal responsibility,” “I am responsible for the decision I make,” “This is a very big decision about what I buy,” and so on. I just want to make sure that we are not trying to put too much faith—one of the last witnesses made some very good points on shared ownership and the fact that people may not have the encompassing knowledge—but I just want to make sure, from your expertise on regulation, that, in this field, you cannot see any damaging consequences for the principles of caveat emptor and personal responsibility by this regulatory structure that you have outlined?

Professor Hodges: Not at all. The most striking example—

[The Chair]

Please answer briefly if you can, because I want to get some more people in.

Professor Hodges: There are various regulatory systems in this country that are now modernising. In many ways, the most outstanding example, which has been there for several decades, is aviation safety. Everyone works together, and they call it an “open and just culture”. They are actually collaborating. They have lots of rules, but you have almost no enforcement, because the Civil Aviation Authority does not need to do it—everyone is doing something.

There are various sectors where you do need public enforcement, and where I would say you need a national system regulator. But you can do a lot through ombudsmen, codes and support. That is now emerging in, say, information and data protection, food standards and various other areas. It is absolutely ideal for property and housing.