Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [HL]

As is well known from my speech at Second Reading, I am very much in favour of a proper system of licensing for bailiffs. In the various amendments in this group, I have also tried to consider what is necessary if we do not go down that road. Amendments Nos. 99 to 102 try and bring home to the Government the great importance of a person who appears to be a bailiff being subject to a common set of rules and regulations, a common set of expectations of how they will behave and a common set of rights for the debtor. This is supposed to be a unitary piece of bailiff law, and it ought to produce a common experience for both the bailiff and the debtor. If we are to have exemptions, I would much rather they ran along the lines of my Amendment No. 107. It is something done in regulations in sympathy with the detail of regulations elsewhere, so that they are merely dealing with technical problems associated with the different employment and technical nature of different classes of bailiffs. We are running anyway into considerable problems as a result of abandoning the terminology of ““bailiff””. Everyone understands what a bailiff is. By calling them ““enforcement agents””, we run into the difficulty that there are many other kinds of enforcement agent in regulations and in practice. There are enforcement agents who pick you up if you litter, and who deal with health and safety matters. We are adopting a common terminology that has no common practice. I suspect it is too late in this Bill, but I hope that when we get to the system of regulation we can allow these people to be called ““bailiffs””. It distinguishes them as a category of person, and in terms of the way the public need to react to them. There has been on my part—and, it seems, on the part of the Government—considerable confusion over who is exempted under the Bill. I merely note that the principal bad behaviour in the BBC ““Whistleblower”” programme was from people who would now be exempt under the Bill, as a result of the way Clause 56 has been drafted. I am happy to enter into correspondence with the Minister on that, if it is a distinction she wishes to continue to draw, but the arrangement at the moment seems very problematic. Amendment No. 104 runs along the same lines as Amendment No. 109, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas. I want to pick up the various things that, if we go for a licensing body, it is important for that body to be able do. It should be the source of rules. There should be rules it is able to make and enforce; something the bailiff community can be held to. It should be able to conduct investigations. When a complaint, or a series of them, gets to the point that the authority needs to know what is going on, it should be able to look. It should have teeth—it should be able to react against bailiffs or look after members of the public in ways that make a difference. My feeling is that as soon as the authority is in place, bailiffs will behave. They are not daft. Most of the big firms are owned by reputable organisations—Equita is owned by Capita. It is not as if these firms are run by criminals or by people of dubious reputation. As soon as a set of rules is in place, it will by and large be complied with, and there will be far fewer problems. If we do not have a licensing authority, the matters listed in Amendment No. 106 are what we will have to require of certificate holders. They should be properly trained; they will have to follow rules, provide information to debtors, and they should be insured. If a bailiff, particularly one who is acting as an individual, does something wrong, there should be a practical redress for the debtor—he should not have to send in a bailiff to pursue a bailiff to get his money back. That should run alongside a compensation scheme if bailiffs misbehave. Whichever way we do this, there will be far fewer problems than at the moment.