Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall be satisfied whichever direction the Government take on that, so long as it is understood that the regulator has that ability. As the noble Lord says, or implies, monitoring without a complaint tends to evolve into monitoring for its own sake. When I take my daughter to nursery school, I have to sign her in and out morning and evening. Why? No one will use that register. It is just a bit of monitoring that Ofsted has put there for the sake of it. I would like to avoid that. If complaint-related monitoring is the way to do that, that seems a reasonable course for the Government to take. However, I do not want a regulator that sits there believing that mischiefs are taking place but thinks that it can do nothing until someone complains, because that is another mischief. If it has to wait until there is an active complaint, rather than saying, ““No, this is going the wrong way. The reputation of the industry is being damaged even if we do not have an individual complaint””, that would be a mischief also. How can one tell? This creature does not yet exist. I hope that it will be well regulated and perform better than the SIA in its early days. However, it has to be able to investigate complaints; otherwise it will have no teeth at all. If someone approaches a regulator saying that a bailiff has misbehaved and it can do nothing about it, then the regulator will have no effect. I want a commitment from the Government to an investigatory power and practice which is open and which goes beyond that which the SIA has chosen to exercise. The SIA does not tell those who have complained what the results of its actions have been, which seems entirely inappropriate in the case of bailiffs. At the end of the day, it must have the ability to exact fines or the cessation of licences in a way which hurts a serious business enough for it to sit up and take notice. On the other hand, I would not like to see bailiffs regulated in the way that teachers are regulated. If teachers have a complaint made against them, they are suspended and can spend one or two years sitting around waiting for adjudication. I do not think that is necessary in the case of bailiffs, except in extreme cases. Generally, if you are trusted to be a bailiff in the first place, you are trusted to continue in the business until you are found to have done wrong. I am looking for something not heavy-handed but which has real force and where the big boys in the business—who are always going to carry most of the business because they will have the big local authority and government contracts—will want to behave and will regulate themselves because the consequence of not doing so could be to lose the business altogether. If I can have not comfort but commitment from the Government that they will see this through, I will be content to withdraw the amendment. For now, I beg to move.