Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Bill [HL]

These clauses relate to the duty to keep records, and the consequences of an estate agent failing to produce information requested by an enforcement officer. Amendment No. 139 would remove the ability of the Secretary of State to provide for how and where records should be kept in regulations. Subsection (4) already gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations prescribing what sort of information should be kept by estate agents. Subsection (6) simply allows regulations also to cover where and how records should be kept. To answer one of the points of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, the policy aim is for a local authority trading standards officer to be able to visit the local estate agency branch which handled a property transaction and check the records immediately. We do not want trading standards officers to have to travel to where a central database is held in order to check records. In addition, we want to set out in regulations that these records can either be in hard copy or held electronically but must be accessible from the local branch. In practice, individual property transaction files are generally held locally. Regulations will help ensure that inspections by trading standards officers are targeted to the benefit of businesses and enforcers alike. Removing lines 29 to 31 may create uncertainty among estate agents about what they have to do to comply with this duty and may also place a greater burden on trading standards officers if the place where records are to be held cannot be specified in regulations. To answer the second point of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, about the amendment to Clause 57, subsection (1) of new Section 11A allows a court to make an order under this section if a person, "““has failed to do something that he is required to do””," under the sections referred to. It therefore follows that subsection (2) requires the defaulter, "““to do the thing that””," he failed to do. I am sure that the amendment was intended to be helpful and to try and improve the drafting of the Bill, but we are confident that parliamentary counsel’s drafting is quite sound.