United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Lords, 2020-11-04
Topic: Mixed Topics
Dianne Hayter (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, this debate is perhaps even more important than some of the others that we have had. The real advantage of a stand part debate is that one can question the purpose of a clause rather than getting down into the weeds of amendments The issue that the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, has raised is fundamental to how we have been looking at this. She asked—these are actually my words, although the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said much the same—whether the competition regime was appropriate for work on the internal market. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, gave away in an earlier debate that this may have been written hastily over the summer; it certainly sounds like a cut-and-paste job, done without stopping to think. Just because it is the same organisation at the same address in Holborn, or wherever the CMA is these days, you cannot just cut and paste it; as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, was saying, it is about the culture of that organisation as well as whether the structure is available. There is a fundamental question here, which my noble friend Lord Stevenson dealt with under Amendment 115, of whether the OIM should be within this framework, as well as the even broader subject of whether these sorts of penalties are appropriate for such a different role There are some specific issues in these clauses, such as whether it is appropriate for the Government to be able to amend the list of exclusions without any involvement of the devolved authorities. We have discussed such matters before, but under this legislation the fixing of penalties could again be altered without any involvement of the devolved authorities. This is serious stuff. They are a part of the overall governance and working of the new internal market, yet the Bill is written as if this is simply a Westminster responsibility I come to what the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, was saying: exactly what is covered by these clauses? In an earlier debate I asked the Minister to set out what services were covered, but obviously I was mumbling at the time because he wrote me a very nice letter on 2 November telling me about the services that are excluded, which of course already exist in the Bill. The question that I was trying to ask is: what services will be covered? I still cannot get a handle on that. This is really important given what has been said about whether the demands and penalties applying to services that are covered are appropriate Obviously I was not very clear about what I wanted but I had talked about housing and whether someone organising a register of housing would count as a service. I was talking about landlords but the letter refers to social housing. We are talking not about social housing but about landlords of private housing. I am involved with another part of the Government, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, in chairing something to try to set up a code for property agents for when the Government are ready to fulfil what they have already promised—that is, to set up a regulator of property agents. They are already a service but the circumstances are different—buying and selling a house in Scotland is very different from England; if you buy there, you tend to go to a solicitor rather than an estate agent—so there are different ways of a service being developed or in existence. Once they are regulated, perhaps property agents will count as a profession, which is a different issue, but before then, as a service, are they going to be covered by these sorts of requirements If that is the case—and this is the main thrust of what I want to say on this group— how will these services know that they are covered by this provision? It is important for anyone risking breaking the law, in the sense of civil law, and being charged a penalty to know that that law applies to them. If they do not define what they are doing as a service and therefore do not know that they are captured by this provision, they may find it difficult to understand that they could be required to provide information. I can imagine that this could really affect property agencies. They need to know that it covers them, which is quite an issue, but it is also unclear to me whether the level of penalties is appropriate for this area. For a small housing management group, for example, this daily rate of £15,000 will basically wipe out its business if it has an £80,000 annual turnover. We are talking about levels of penalty It seems to me that those agents are covered by this, but I am unclear about the appeals process. If they are asked a question, how do they know that it has legal force behind it? Even if they are told that—most of these people will of course not have lawyers —and there is a penalty, do they have any appeal? I could not find one in the Bill but I am sure the Minister will be able to tell me; it is quite unusual to have a penalty without any sort of appeal. I could not work this out but I am sure the Minister will My main ask is: can we know the sort of services that will be covered? Perhaps we could hear more—not in legal language but in language that I can understand—about how they would know and about their rights to appeal any fixed penalty.