Enterprise Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-11-30
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Jonathan Mendelsohn (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, these amendments are concerned with matters related to pubs. It is regrettable that we had to table them because we had a very productive discussion and came to quite an effective conclusion during the passage of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015. Given the consultations, we had not anticipated that we would have to return to this issue, but unfortunately we have. First, I pay tribute to the Minister, who has always been constructive and has helped us to try to address some of the problems that have arisen. In many ways, the amendments are the result of problems which became apparent during the consultation. Some feared that there was a conspiracy. I will not refer to the other option explicitly—but it is more the other option than a conspiracy. I hope that during today’s proceedings we will be able to resolve the problems Some technical matters which are material to getting the situation right still need to be sorted out. Certainly the response deadline for the consultation with the pub industry has been difficult, not least because this is the busiest time of year for publicans, given that 25% of their trade is through the Christmas period. This is not an easy thing for them to assimilate at this point. Further, a consultation in two parts for provisions which may interlink is difficult to respond to until such time as the second part is available. That lies behind part of our argument as to why they should be taken together and the deadline extended. As I say, there are also some technical matters to which we should give further consideration, and we hope that the Government will look at them One of those is the reference to a wholesale price list. There is not really a national wholesale price list. Many brewers will not produce a wholesale price list at all, citing competition reasons. A price list comes from a trade body and is made up of merely outline prices, but it is artificial in terms of the open and free market. No free trader pays the prices outlined; only tied tenants pay anything near the prices shown, and sometimes but not always with varying degrees of discount. There is no such provision. Part of this is because, as always with government, sometimes the people who prepared the detail of a Bill have been moved on by the time it has gone through. I have one question for the Minister on these matters: would the Government consider in the future having at least one of the civil servants who had been involved in a Bill remain to see through all the consultations on the secondary instruments? That would be useful The fundamental foundation for the consultation paper should have been that there would be a form of parallel rent assessment for new and existing tied tenants, and that existing tied tenants would have various opportunities to consider a market rent only option—the bare minimum and simplest event being the periodic rent review, which in most cases is every five years. The announcement that the PRA would be done away with altogether, along with the proposal for additional conditions to be placed on the MRO opportunity at rent review—it would come into play only when a higher rent had been proposed by the pub-owning businesses—looked to many like a suspicious neutering of all the positive steps that the primary legislation had provided. These were merely errors in framing, rather than a desire to reverse the legislation The PRA was initially proposed by tenant and consumer groups as simply an informative tool, enabling a tenant to have a meaningful comparison of the tied and free-of-tie terms on offer. Should the tied tenant consider the tied terms demanded by their pub-owning businesses to be leaving them worse off than if they were free of tie, they could remedy the situation by taking a market rent only option, severing their product and service ties, and paying a market rent. For that reason, PRA and MRO are closely co-dependent, one providing necessary information and the other providing remedy if required. The original draft small business Bill proposed no MRO option, leaving a remedy void. Therefore, the PRA proposed by the Government was to be both an informative tool and a remedy, allowing for a third party potentially to determine a tied rent but leaving the tied product and service ties intact The combination of the MRO being voted in, following the events in another place on 18 November 2014, and the realisation that conducting a PRA calculation would throw up problems for the adjudicator potentially controlling the market and saddled with the task of valuing what is called SCOFA—special commercial or financial advantages on offer by pub-owning businesses, some of which might be difficult to quantify—led to the conclusion that the MRO could be the remedy. By eliminating the PRA, the consultation proposal failed to recognise that PRA is necessary to consider whether the MRO remedy should be taken We have got to a position where the Government, in bringing together these things, tried to ensure that the process was simplified, so they have absorbed the PRA process in the MRO process. Following discussions that we and stakeholders have had, we believe that we have probably reached a satisfactory position and that Amendment 70ZD is catered for, subject to confirmation from the Minister that the Government will consult, in the secondary consultation paper, on a mechanism that ensures that a tenant who requests an MRO offer under the terms of the Act would also have the option of accepting a rent review proposal and initiating a rent assessment at the same time. The latter ensures that the tenant has a meaningful comparison of the tied and free-of-tie terms on offer when considering taking the MRO option The wording of Amendment 70ZC may be familiar to noble Lords. This is because it would reinstate the MRO opportunities and triggers in the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015, debated earlier this year. I will briefly outline the chain of events that led us to table the amendment. The small business Bill introduced the original MRO package and the conditions under which it would be offered. A tenant would have the right to request MRO: at rent renewal or at lease renewal; in connection with a significant increase in the price at which any product or service subject to a product or service tie was applied to the tied pub tenant, where the increase was not reasonably foreseeable; or after a trigger event occurred that, "is beyond the control of the tied pub tenant … was not reasonably foreseeable … has a significant impact on the level of trade that could reasonably be expected to be achieved at the tied pub", or, "is of a description specified in the Pubs Code" However, the consultation indicated otherwise. It proposed that, to meet the right balance, the tenant will gain the right to request an MRO offer following receipt of a rent review proposal, but only if the rent proposed by the pubco is higher than the existing rent the tenant pays. Rents that rise in line with inflation would not trigger the MRO, so in effect a pubco could sidestep the legislation by maintaining rent—very possibly at an unfair level. The tenant would be worse off as their rent increases year on year, in line with inflation. How does triggering an MRO only at a rent increase provide a balance, as stated in the consultation? Will the Minister confirm that, if rents were to rise as a result of inflation, this would fail to trigger an MRO? What other opportunities does the tenant then have for an MRO and how likely is it to happen? We are keen to gauge a sense of why there has been a significant policy change when it was firmly understood that tenants push for a rent review to trigger an MRO as a bare minimum.