Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 11: 11: After Clause 69 , insert the following new Clause— ““Regulator Within twelve months of Royal Assent, the Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament regulations to create a specialist regulator of enforcement agents that will— (a) licence enforcement agents, (b) approve the businesses and organisations that employ them, (c) accredit the professional bodies that represent them, (d) set standards of conduct, (e) monitor performance, (f) investigate complaints, and (g) punish failure to comply with standards of conduct and order redress where appropriate.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, perhaps I may start by being nice and saying that the Minister and her whole team have been immensely helpful in dealing with bailiff regulation since the Bill first appeared. I am grateful to them for their time and effort. However, I think that they have taken a severe wrong turning in trying to cobble together a regulator out of the Security Industry Authority and various other bits of legislation that they happen to have lying around. It will be extremely difficult to get it right and it will require a lot of perseverance and diplomacy to make it happen at all. The noble Baroness has those characteristics; I hope that she remains in her place for long enough to do it. The Government have chosen to go for a mix of Security Industry Authority and existing DCA powers to try between them to provide for a regulator that will come up to scratch in regulating bailiffs. It will clearly take a long while to get there. Today I am aiming, not to impose on the noble Baroness my own idea of what a regulator should be—I hope that this is a fight that will carry on into the Commons and that they might do that—but to obtain from the Government a commitment to see the matter through to the end. Where we are now is where we began in 1992 when it first became apparent that bailiffs were misbehaving in their enforcement of poll-tax debts. That misbehaviour has carried on unabated; indeed, it has been exacerbated because so many more aspects of our lives are now frequently attended to by bailiffs, notably congestion charges and other incidental taxes on motorists. The more time passes and the more fixed penalties are invented to avoid lengthy procedures for our police force, the more bailiffs will come into the necessary matter of enforcement at the end of the day. From the many people who have written to me, I know that it is enormously important that that serial and compounded injustice is brought to an end in a way that preserves the revenue of the Government and their various offshoots and preserves the principle that those who are owed money should pay it. It is crucial to get that right. My amendment sets out the principal matters on which I am looking for a commitment—I emphasise the word ““commitment””. We all hope that we will go in the same direction; but I want a commitment. Paragraphs (a) and (b) are self-explanatory: not only are we looking for the individual bailiff to be regulated but also the people who control bailiffs; otherwise it is too easy to maintain the fiction that people are running a reputable bailiff business but allow individual bailiffs to misbehave below that. It must bite on those such as Equita, a subsidiary of Capita, which is a very reputable company. They must realise that they must behave. It must involve setting standards of conduct which have consequences for a bailiff. It must be known both to the bailiff and to the people whom they are dealing with what standards of conduct are expected. That must be made evident at the beginning of the process, as the High Court bailiffs do now. The first part of the transaction is that the debtor is handed a leaflet or leaflets explaining the procedure and their rights, so that everything is clear from the outset and we do not have the licensed deception that we have at present. The regulator must monitor performance. It must be an active regulator, but not an overbearing one. One or two of the smaller bailiffs have written to me to say that they really do not want a body that will charge them immense fees just for the pleasure of investigating them. I hope that the process will result in an industry that largely behaves; none the less, there must be monitoring.