Domestic Building Works (Consumer Protection) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-11-19
Topic: Housing
Mark Robert Timothy Garnier (Conservative, Centre-right): Self-evidently not. My hon. Friend is right to ask that. A voluntary scheme is good, because builders who sign up to it can demonstrate that they are maintaining a certain level of trust and obligations to their consumer. The problem is that the consumer needs to know an awful lot about the building trade to know about that scheme in the first place. We as Members of Parliament have many people coming to our surgeries who have got themselves into trouble with, for example, financial advisers, only to discover that they were not regulated. The problem is that those people did not understand the system well enough to work that out. While some will recognise that there is a voluntary scheme that they can check out, it was not until I got deep into the weeds of the Bill that I discovered it, having spoken to all sorts of quantity surveyors and all the rest of it as I tried to progress my own building problems Within all this, there should be rules regarding a code of conduct, honesty, safety and quality of work. Failure to comply should carry a list of sanctions, including losing the licence. An option that could be included is a compensation scheme rather like the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. That is an example of how consumers who have lost out as a result of poor and bad practice are compensated for their loss from a scheme financed, again, not by the taxpayer, but by levies placed on licence holders of the relevant sector. The double effect is that the consumer gets their losses covered, if that is deemed appropriate, while the industry as a whole is incentivised to self-police. At the end of the day, the industry does not want to pay more money to bail out these compensation schemes for rogue builders; it would be incentivised to report rogue builders. Importantly, an ombudsman would be able to assess loss to consumers without the need for expensive and lengthy engagement of legal and professional experts to defend bogus bills or to challenge poor work These proposals are aimed at ending the decades-long history of consumers who being ripped off in one way or another by shoddy, rogue, cowboy builders. Voluntary schemes do not seem to have done away with this problem, and the building industry seems to be the one industry remaining where consumers spend quite significant amounts of money in a totally unregulated and uncovered area. Indeed, many people agree that this is beyond redemption. The report of the Federation of Master Builders on this subject in 2018 cited the fact that even the construction firms themselves agree that a compulsory licensing scheme is necessary: 77% of SME builders agreed to the FMB proposals, while 78% of consumers did likewise. I think we would all agree that enough is enough. To steal a phrase from those on the Front Bench, you cannot build back better if you cannot trust your builder This is a very complicated area, and I do appreciate that it is not straightforward to go rushing in and create a compulsory licensing scheme, but I am very interested to hear what the Minister has to say. By the way, I am very grateful to him for coming along. Although building is his area, his role does not cover the Bill, but the Minister responsible for consumer protection—the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully)—was not available. However, I am very interested to hear what he has to say, and incredibly keen to continue to collaborate with the Government to try to find a solution to this quite huge problem.