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Consumer Rights

I understand that Holyrood Services Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Elphinstone, the builders, and not a separate property management or factoring company. It seems to be Elphinstone in another guise, but the eventual contract and deed of conditions was with Holyrood Services Ltd, although the preceding material had come from, and many of the subsequent dealings had been with, Elphinstone. The second issue is wider, and relates not just to the Corinthian Quay development, but to the long-running issue of how purchasers may assert effective rights against builders who do not fulfil their side of a bargain. Owners may in some circumstances have the right to cancel a purchase if defects have arisen, but that is often not an effective remedy if people have sold their existing house and moved job, and would have to get involved in lengthy litigation to try to cancel the contract. There have been five such developments in my constituency. The one at Corinthian Quay is the worst, but there are others. One problem is that owners may be able to pursue good legal avenues, but may be fearful of entering what may be very expensive proceedings against a large and powerful opponent. My constituents have found that no independent body can provide even initial free advice, and there is clearly a gap in the representation available to consumers. I will return to that, but I hope that the Minster will address the matter today, or write to me in due course. The third matter concerns NHBC cover. In the particular case in my constituency it now seems to be doing a good job in actively trying to sort out the problems that it has inherited. However, through no fault of its own, but because of arrangements under which it operates as a backstop for problems with developments, it could become actively involved only at a fairly late stage in the process because residents must first go through a number of other steps. Is there a way of encouraging the NHBC—I understand that it is an industry body—to have a more proactive role in such cases, perhaps with a mediation or ombudsman role at an early stage, to try to persuade developers to deal with problems such as those that my constituents have suffered for far too long? The second issue is very different, but also involves consumers thinking that they have bought something from one company, only to discover that they have bought it from another, connected company, as a result of which they lose protection. The issue concerns a holiday in Mallorca booked by one of my constituents and his elderly parents. I do not have time to go into the details of what was wrong with the holiday. Basically, it was the holiday from hell, and it was made worse because the facilities were entirely unsuitable for a person with a disability, which one of the parents is, even though my constituents had made it clear when booking the holiday that they needed an appropriate hotel. As I said, my constituents had many problems and the upshot was that they wanted to claim compensation from the company with which they had booked the holiday—First Choice. At least they thought that they had booked the holiday with First Choice; after all, they bought it from a shop calling itself a First Choice hypermarket. Their correspondence, when they complained, was with First Choice. However, when they started to complain, it turned out that the contract was apparently not with First Choice, but with a subsidiary company—First 4 Hotels. Although First Choice is bonded with the Association of British Travel Agents, apparently First 4 Hotels is not, so when my constituent complained to ABTA, it said that it could not do anything about the problem as First 4 Hotels was not an ABTA company. That appears to me to be a complete abdication of responsibility by ABTA. It seems clear that the company arrangements in this case have the effect—whether by design or not, I cannot say—of allowing First Choice to wash its hands of complaints made by customers by saying that the arrangements are with a different company, even when the customers believed that they were booking with an ABTA-bonded company. I believe that ABTA should investigate this case and withdraw its endorsement from any travel company that appears to make use of subsidiaries in a misleading way, as certainly seems to have happened with First Choice in this case. If ABTA is not prepared to investigate or take action, I urge the Minister to do so. When the Minister wrote to me on the issue a few weeks ago, when I first raised the problem, he invited my constituents to raise their complaints with ABTA, but as I have pointed out, they have already tried to do so, only to be met with the response that ABTA cannot get involved because they did not book their holiday with an ABTA company. The whole point is that the holiday was in effect with an ABTA company. In my view, ABTA should not be able to get out of its responsibilities as a trade body in that way.