Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has spoken to his amendment reasonably, modestly and with humour, but I do not agree with it. I express a great deal of doubt about it. As I understand it,the view of the then Labour Government in 1979 at the time of the Estate Agents Act and, indeed, of the following Conservative Government, was in essence that no regulations under Section 22 of the Act should be made until a need for standards of competence was demonstrated for the estate-agency world. There was concern then, and there should still be concern today, that competition in the field of acting as an agent for the selling of residential property would be unnecessarily inhibited if standards and qualifications were specified, and there would invariably be a tendency, promoted by existing estate agents, especially those like the noble Earl with professional qualifications, to push for more exacting standards than are necessary or desirable in the relatively simple act of acting as an agent for the sale of residential property. It is not at all obvious, and the noble Earl has not indicated, what the minimum standards are that are necessary or desirable for an estate agent to have when handling a typical private house purchase. It seems clear, but the noble Earl did not indicate whether it is clear to him, that it would be well over the top to require the standards of a qualified surveyor or valuer with the six years’ training which the noble Earl went through. If it is not to be the high standards of a qualified surveyor, it is hardly worth laying down a few basic requirements of competence. Proposals for training, examinations and long periods of apprenticeship are often promoted by existing practitioners in particular occupations for new people coming into that field. We should appreciate that the interests of existing practitioners and the interests of the public do not necessarily coincide. I recall an example given by the great economist Milton Friedman—he was usually regarded as a Conservative economist—of a proposal that all newly established barbers in a particular state in the United States should be required to undergo 1,000 hours of training in the theory of hair before they were allowed to wield any scissors on customers. This proposal came not from consumers concerned about the competence of barbers but from existing barbers who would have been only too delighted if competition were restricted. I do not think the noble Earl admitted or recognised the fact that most complaints about estate agents, nowadays and in the past, are not about incompetence but about malpractice and a lack of integrity in advancing their own interests instead of those of the clients for whom they are supposed to act and keep in the forefront of their minds. Such matters should be dealt with by the negative licensing powers of the Office of Fair Trading to strike off estate agents from acting in that world, and by the ombudsman schemes that exist in practice at the moment or that might exist in statutory form under the Bill. I doubt the desirability of the amendment. I would be interested to hear from the noble Earl and the Minister what these minimum standards would be and how we can ensure that they are not raised regularly from time to time to suit not the interests of the public but those of estate agents.