Compensation Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, for his comments. The reason why I am not going to accept Amendment No. 52 is because, in the vast majority of cases, we would expect complaints to be resolved between the authorised person and the consumer, and we want to involve the regulator only when the complaint was not resolved to the consumer’s satisfaction, rather than his looking at everyone. So there might be circumstances in which a consumer approaches the regulator with a complaint and, when they have not done so already, is advised to approach the authorised person, and it is then resolved. That would not be permissible under the amendment, and I hope that the noble Lord accepts that that is why I am not accepting it.