My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, for not giving him warning that I would speak in the gap. I have, however, informed both the Front Benches. I was not certain that I would be here in time today, which is why I was not able to put my name on the list. I apologise to the House for that.
I speak because of a particular interest of mine arising from my earlier role as vice-chairman of the Financial Services Consumer Panel. We were dealing with PPI
and pressed first the Financial Ombudsman Service and then the FSA very hard to take action on its mis-selling. We thought that we had achieved a lot when it was realised that, while the product was not necessarily bad in itself, it was being mis-sold. It took a long time to persuade people of that, but when we had it was clear that a number of them would get redress. I was therefore not ashamed but immensely disappointed to discover that the unintended consequence of that was this absolute barrage of phone calls; many noble Lords, many of whom may not be here today, have recounted stories of being offered money back that they had never actually spent.
As the House will know—there was an exchange on this just yesterday—we are quite chuffed that we have now got a similar move forward on the ability of tenants and landlords who might have been mis-sold something, or mistreated by a letting agent, to take that to an ombudsman. That will become legislation and will come into force some time in the coming year. However, I fear that the same lot of people will again be after rich pickings and will start phoning up tenants and landlords in the same sort of way. We cannot just deal with this problem issue by issue.
The Bill therefore seems extremely timely. I myself have opted out but I still get these calls, mostly from abroad, which do not seem to be caught by the opt-out. One is also not able to trace the number to call back and make complaints. Partly personally, but partly on behalf of those consumer groups that do so much to get things such as redress and then find that that leads to this sort of nonsense, I thank the noble Lord for introducing the Bill and I wish it well.
1.43 pm