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“But the procedure in Schedule 12 may not be used...to recover debts due from the Crown...to take control of or sell goods of the Crown...or...to enter premises occupied by the Crown.”
I understand that there would be great embarrassment, for instance, if the bailiffs could go into Buckingham palace, especially this afternoon at the same time as other people. That would clearly be inappropriate. However, we discovered in Committee that that provision also referred to Crown agencies—all of those acting under the authority of the Crown. We believe that there should be no exemption. Some years ago we changed the rules to reduce the exemptions that apply in general to the Crown and they should be reduced here too.
We have argued that clear information should be given to individuals about their rights, and our amendment No. 3 is similar to those tabled by the hon. Member for Great Grimsby. It would require that Her Majesty’s Court Service prepare an information sheet, to be made generally available and that reflects the rules and tells debtors of the rights and remedies available to them. That is the same point as that made by the hon. Gentleman. At the moment, the law is confusing. If we went down the Old Kent road in my constituency and asked people when they thought they had a duty to let someone who was chasing them for money into their house, we would get all sorts of different answers, because the law is not generally known or understood. People do not know when they are obliged to let people in. Many people would say that a home in England is a castle and that we must be allowed to keep people out. It is indeed the case that in many cases people do not have to let others into their house, even if they come with some rights over property, because there are processes that have to be gone through. It is important to make that clear.
The document should cover the powers of entry; the powers of re-entry; when reasonable force can be used; when force can be used; exempt goods; how goods can be secured; how goods can be taken away; what can be charged, because goods can be removed and retained, while the costs tick up like a meter and the owners cannot recover them; what remedy is available if goods are collected wrongly; how one can complain; how one can ask for time to pay; and where one should go for advice and assistance. That information is important.
Amendment No. 7 proposes that the debtor, when seeking to enforce rights against those who come to seize their goods, should have legal aid. There should be an ability to challenge the authority, whether it is the state, local government or the private sector.
Our amendments are about giving the citizen the power to know the law and their rights, and ensuring that people in positions of authority—especially those with a financial hold over them—cannot abuse that position. We need a new regime and the amendments would help towards that end. I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic to them.
Mr. Newmark:
I am delighted to be able to return to this important if somewhat heterogeneous Bill, although I very much doubt that our deliberations will be among
the top one or two stories on the news tonight. The Minister may look doubtful about that, but it is a shame because the Bill will have a considerable impact on those of our constituents unfortunate enough to find themselves in financial difficulty.
If anything is more stressful than moving house, it is probably the thought that someone may enter it to remove treasured possessions. The Opposition have been consistent in our appeals for a code of conduct that is transparent and accessible to members of the public, and on which they can rely when they are in difficulty with bailiffs. The poor, vulnerable and socially excluded are at particular risk, but a code of conduct or set of notional standards would bring universal benefits.
The slightly tenuous argument was advanced in Committee that bailiffs already have their own code of conduct, and that a Government code would be to no avail in dealing with the few bailiffs who have decided to ignore their own. However, national standards or a code of conduct set by the Government would ensure consistency and hold up a mirror to the whole enforcement profession, and that could not but be to the advantage of the public as a whole.
If that is not sufficient, proposed new paragraph (2) of amendment No. 13 makes it explicit that the code would not be a matter of whimsy, but that people would be expected to adhere to it. We are all aware of the sterling work of the citizens advice bureaux in assisting people who get into debt. Staff at the office covering Braintree, Witham and Halstead have written to me with their general concerns about the Bill, and specific examples of problems that they have encountered recently.
In one example, a client was being chased for a debt even though she thought that she was up to date with it. Indeed, it turned out that the debt was nearly 10 years old. That was unfortunate in itself, but her real concern was that the bailiff involved was demanding entry to her house and would not accept any payment terms whatsoever. The CAB client had offered to pay the debt over a period of six months, but the bailiff said that he could only accept three monthly instalments.
I know that such problems are all too common, and that is why I continue to believe that the Bill is missing an opportunity to set out, clearly and accessibly, the behaviour expected from bailiffs when dealing with the poor, vulnerable or socially excluded. Society and Government have a special responsibility to those people—an implicit responsibility that ought to be made explicit.
Requiring bailiffs to act proportionately would also be an attempt to legislate for common sense. The Minister has that quality in abundance, but unfortunately it is sometimes lacking in bailiffs, who can clock up hundreds of pounds of costs in order to get their hands on pennies.
The Minister places her trust in training as part of the beefed-up certification process, but training can still fall short of the mark, even when those participating in it have the best of intentions. In addition, the certification process will almost certainly be opaque to public scrutiny, whereas a code of conduct and
minimum standards would be clearly understood by the enforcement profession and, more importantly, the public.
In Committee, there was some question over the secrecy of the bailiffs bible. The Minister keeps it under lock and key in her office because it concerns operations issues which, in her opinion, should not be made public. That is indicative of one of the problems with the Bill. There is a suspicion, or even just a perception, that a lot is going on behind closed doors in terms of available guidance, standards and training.
A code of conduct or recognisable national standards would go a long way towards dispelling that perception. The Minister has been kind enough to acknowledge that the predecessors to these amendments were all well intentioned, but suggested that they were unnecessary because the conduct of bailiffs would be well enough regulated by appropriate regulations. However, she hit the nail on the head when she said that she did not expect a debtor to read them and that there was no chance of that happening, but more chance that they might lead to national standards or a code of conduct that is clearly in the public domain. She has been steadfast in her position on that line of argument, but I hope that she will reconsider the position today.
I also wish to speak in support of amendment No. 12 on the need to provide in the Bill a list of items exempted from possessions that enforcement officers are able to remove. I do not in any way suggest that it is a full list. As we discussed in Committee, regardless of whether it is even possible to provide a full list, it is also inexpedient to do so because such a list would need to evolve over time. Nevertheless, a core list in the Bill and further exemptions spelled out by regulations are not mutually exclusive. If I am incorrect in that assumption, I hope that the Minister will correct me in her usual gracious way. My concern is that parts of the Bill are so skeletal that it is remarkable that they have not been seized upon by Damien Hirst as a candidate for diamond-plating.
I am grateful for the Ministry’s detailed policy statement on delegated powers, but the fact that it reaches 65 pages on its own suggests either that it is the very model of detail or that there are an awful lot of delegated powers. In Committee, the Minister advanced two principal arguments for the Government's reliance on regulations, and I should like to challenge each of them. First, she said that it was necessary to preserve flexibility by not pinning the exemptions to a list on the face of the Bill. I quite agree with that, and I have no doubt that thorough consultation, which I hope the Government are committed to, will turn up some worthy exemptions that have not yet occurred to the Minister.
In the space of just a few minutes, members of the Committee thought of a number of potentially necessary additions to the list, but I do not think that anyone has suggested that a list appearing in schedule 12 need be exhaustive. The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) does not seek to address matters like the prophesy of future technological advances, or to start listing all trade tools that might conceivably stand
in the line of fire—wigs and gowns included. However, a list included in schedule 12 merely needs to cover some of the ground as an explicit indication of the Government’s intentions, and one which has statutory authority.
That brings me to the second of the Minister's arguments, which was that the paucity of parliamentary time would make any list contained in the Bill entirely untenable because of the scant opportunity to amend it. That perfectly reasonable objection could be overcome by the simple addition of a reference to any further regulations that the Minister should, from time to time, need to lay before Parliament. I assume that I am right in thinking that the Government would not envisage the need to come to Parliament to repeal the protection that the amendment offers to guide dogs. The Minister will be glad to hear that I shall not devote any further time to the potential inequity of canine repossession, but will she address one question that arose from my reading of the detailed policy statement?
Paragraphs 143 and 144 concern situations in which enforcement officers may take control of goods that would normally be exempted but that have a value beyond their common use and can therefore be easily replaced. The guidance gives the example of an antique dining table, which could easily be replaced by a utilitarian table in order to release some value. How does the Minister envisage that process operating in practice, given that enforcement officers will not be replacing like with like? That seems to be a recipe for confusion or even abuse.
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If the enforcement officers take the table and replace it, who meets the cost of the replacement until such a time as the original is sold, and what provision is made for the cost of the related logistics? Enforcement officers could spend a considerable sum on finding replacements for otherwise exempted items—for example, money would be spent on buying and transporting them—but the underlying debt might not be reduced at all by the whole process. Perhaps the Minister could comment on the complexity and the potential for abuse represented by the guidance. I do not wish to go any wider of the amendment, but I hope that she will reconsider the Government’s position on the inclusion of a list in the schedule.
Finally, I deal with amendment No. 15 which relates to single women and children. I am conscious that the issue has already been addressed at some length, but I wish to make two points. First, it seems an entirely reasonable proposition that single women—by which I mean women on their own—should be dealt with by female enforcement officers. It is a well established principle that searches by police, Customs officers and security staff are sensitive to gender, because searches are invasive. Visits by bailiffs are similarly invasive and deserve to be treated with comparable sensitivity.
Secondly, on the issue of children under the age of 16, the amendment is necessary to reinforce the available protection. The Minister confirmed in Committee that there is something of a lacuna between the protection offered to children under 12 and that offered to children under 18. If the only person on the premises is under 12, the bailiff is required to withdraw,
but if there is someone aged between 12 and 18 the bailiff is entitled to make inquiries before leaving. The protections deal only with situations in which a child is home alone and do not address the position of children who are otherwise subjected to a visit by a bailiff. I hope that the Minister will comment on that situation. I am conscious that she will argue that bailiffs will be trained in how to deal with children and other vulnerable people, but I just question whether that is enough.
Vera Baird: As everyone has said, this is quite a sizeable group of amendments. I will deal with them painstakingly and thoroughly, although I hope not tediously. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) talked about the Englishman’s castle again. I want to quote briefly from an article in The Times, which said:
“An ‘Englishman’s castle’ fuss will always erupt when someone claiming special rights wants the portcullis raised. The argument is every bit as old as the language it is couched in. Victor Tunkel, secretary of the legal-history group the Selden Society, explains that creditors even in Anglo-Saxon times had a ‘right of distress’, allowing them to ‘seize a bloke’s best beast, the tools of his trade”—
“or his bed’. Royal tax collectors similarly were seldom shy of crossing the threshold, and history has offered few ruder awakenings than ‘Open up in the name of the King!’ All that has changed is the volume and complexity of the law”.
We intend to protect the vulnerable and to ensure that the law is known to the public. I have already mentioned on many occasions, both in Committee and in the Chamber, the extent to which we will go to ensure that the Bill does exactly that. The hon. Gentleman makes much play of the increased powers in the Bill. He knows that I have undertaken that, until there is a satisfactory and full regulatory process in place, and a complaints system and a licensing system, the new power that he is particularly concerned about—breaking into houses—will not be introduced. I am at a loss as to what the hon. Gentleman thinks anyone could possibly add to that.
The hon. Gentleman tells horror story after horror story, but I could do the same thing because I, too, have a citizens advice bureau and vulnerable people in my constituency. I do not doubt that Redcar has as many rogue bailiffs as his constituency and that of the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark). That is exactly why we are introducing the new regime. This part of the Bill is designed to put an end to precisely the kind of mischief about which we have heard.
The hon. Member for Braintree made an attractive speech, as ever. Contrary to his assertion, I have no kind of bible under lock and key anywhere in my possession. The bailiffs bible, which he mentioned, was made available to a body that asked for it—perhaps it was the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust—with redacted passages. He says that I keep the document secret, but I offered each and every member of the Public Bill Committee the opportunity to look at the document without the redacted bits. Who has come to look at it? No one.
Let me deal first with amendment No. 8. Hon. Members might recall that there was some discussion in Committee about clause 84 and the application of part 3 to the Crown. There are already statutory
obligations on the Crown to ensure that creditors who might be owed money by the Crown are paid. The Crown can be sued and it cannot ignore any judgment made against it by a court. Section 25 of the Crown Proceedings Act 1947 makes provision for the satisfaction of orders against the Crown. The Crown will thus not escape its obligations simply because it is exempt from enforcement under schedule 12.
As a matter of fact amendment No. 8 would not work, because although it would allow an enforcement agent to use the power in schedule 12 against the Crown to take control of or to sell goods, the agent would not be able to enter premises to get them in the first place. He would thus be able to take control of or sell only Crown goods found on premises occupied by a third party. I am sure that that is not what anyone intends. Given that it is clear that existing provisions will ensure that orders against the Crown will be satisfied, there is no need for the amendment.
I acknowledge the good intentions behind amendment No. 68, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell). Indeed, there are good intentions behind all his amendments, including even his rebellion-causing new clause. Contracts between Her Majesty’s Courts Service and enforcement companies for the enforcement of unpaid magistrates courts fines are already published. They are available on the departmental website.
While the Department has no direct control over the contractual negotiations that local authorities carry out when tendering out work to outside enforcement companies for the enforcement of parking fines and local taxes, we would certainly consider that the publication of such contracts would be good practice. However, hon. Members should bear in mind the fact that that many local authorities do not contract out such services. They are often carried out in-house by directly employed members of a local authority’s staff. In that case, the contract would be a contract of employment between the local authority and its employee and the publication of such a contract would be intrusive, improper and unnecessary. However, I hope that my assertion is sufficiently strong to allow my hon. Friend to feel that real steps forward have been made.
Amendments Nos. 10, 11, 13, 15 and 41 are concerned with protecting the vulnerable. As I have said many times, I agree entirely with the sentiments behind the amendments, as will hon. Members on both sides of the House. I am surprised and sorry that anyone thinks that schedule 12 is gobbledegook. I think that it is straightforward and easy to understand.
National standards have been talked about. Although I do not have a chained-up ‘bible’, I have a copy of the national standards in question: “Effective Enforcement”—the national standards for enforcement agents. They will be reflected in the new enhanced and extended certification process for enforcement agents who are not Crown employees but who will work through the county court. They will also be reflected in future regulation by the Security Industry Authority, when that fine day dawns. The training requirements for enforcement agencies will ensure that all agents have a thorough working knowledge of all the relevant areas of enforcement law and of the national standards.
Agents will have to comply with many other things to undertake enforcement work, and the training will cover those requirements. Agents will need to be able to deal with potentially dangerous or aggressive situations, develop negotiating skills and understand and acquire the ability to deal with vulnerable or potentially vulnerable debtors, as well as undergoing enhanced criminal record checks. I have already alluded to the fact that the deposit of a bond will be required, and that it could be used and forfeited if there was a breach of certification.
Crown-employed enforcement agents will continue to be subject to their own high standards of training and guidance, which include diversity awareness and dealing with the vulnerable and with potentially vulnerable situations. As I have repeatedly said, no one disputes the fact that there is little complaint about those people. I reiterate that the intention is for a commonality of standards in the future among those against whom there is no complaint, so as to bring up to those standards those against whom there is complaint—in so far as those people survive in the industry at all, because if they are cowboys, they will be out at first base.
Simon Hughes: Is there an automatic penalty for breach of any of the standards in the manual?
Vera Baird: I do not know that it would be an automatic penalty. We intend to bring the national standards and the requirements of schedule 12 into the terms of certification and ultimately the terms of licensing. The question will then be whether there has been a breach of the certificate or the licence, depending on the stage in the evolution of regulation in which the breach occurs. At that point, the processes and responses that I have already set out will apply, so it is more complicated than an automatic penalty.
Simon Hughes: May I deduce, therefore, that the answer is that breach of standards would normally result in loss of licence? I am not trying to trap the Minister; I just wanted to find out about the status of the standards and what the effect of a breach would be.
Vera Baird: I do not feel trapped. The hon. Gentleman makes an inappropriate inquiry, if I may say so, but the question is not as simple as he suggests. Somebody who breached their licence or certificate in a fairly minor way, which might still be couched in terms of a breach of national standards, might not automatically lose their licence. The hon. Gentleman will recall that a range of penalties is available to the county court judge, who may, when dealing with a complaint in certain circumstances, think it appropriate to summon the bailiff before him and tell him off. Many steps would be taken before actually ending somebody’s livelihood, but I have no doubt that in serious or repeated breaches of standards judges will act appropriately and with rigour. Similarly, the SIA will implement the standards with rigour.
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