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Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, is not rising to her feet—presumably she is the prisoner of a fortunate jailer on this topic—I shall supplement the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Lee. I must declare an interest as a director of a holding company that owns estate and letting agencies. What my noble friend said is entirely correct. In Committee and on Report, I failed to understand the Government’s answer to the point made by a number of noble Lords—particularly the noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Lee—that the practices that the Bill is designed to improve the regulation of in relation to estate agents apply not only equally but even more to letting agents. Letting agents often operate in markets that are rather different from the average house build, house owner, house sale, house purchase markets that estate agents deal with. This is a wonderful opportunity for the Government to bring control of letting agents in line with the controls that they are bringing in for estate agents. The only significant argument from the Government is that they are keeping this under review and will look at the position of letting agents. The problem with that approach is that—in particular with a Government obsessed with having Home Office Bills in the Queen’s Speech, almost to the exclusion of everything else—if the opportunity is missed to include control and regulation of letting agencies in this Bill, I defy any Minister to have the confidence to believe that there will be another opportunity in the next decade; when the matter is discussed before the relevant Queen’s Speech, they will always be told, ““Oh, you had your opportunity in 2007. You didn’t put that in then so don’t think you can have the parliamentary time to have it now””. For that reason, I urge the Minister, even at this late stage—notwithstanding the fact that he appears to have the support of the Conservative Front Bench—to listen to the wise words of the noble Earl and to accept his amendment.