My Lords, my noble friend will remember that at Second Reading I raised rather similar anxieties that the case for this change had not been made. Since then, I have tried to dig a bit deeper to find out what lies behind it. I was intrigued by quite a long article in today’s Times, which I tend to read with my cup of tea in bed in the morning. In the business section was the headline:
“Land Registry sale put out to grass as row continues over Royal Mail”.
The article—I will not read it out in full—says that the suggestion that the Land Registry should be privatised has a long history. We have had a statement that there is no present intention to privatise the Land Registry; indeed, I have quoted it from some of the correspondence from the Minister. However, what I find particularly
intriguing—and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, may remember this—is that it has now been revealed that in answer to a Parliamentary Question in 2000, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine, the then Lord Chancellor, stated that the Government were considering privatising the Land Registry. That was the previous Government, nearly 15 years ago.
The argument has rumbled on for a long time, and I wonder where it all comes from. I cannot believe that this has ever been part of a concerted government policy supported by the Treasury or by successive departments of industry. My right honourable friend Michael Fallon, who has now been promoted to the Ministry of Defence, is quoted in the article as saying recently:
“Due to the importance of the Land Registry in the effective operation of the UK property market, we’ve concluded that we need further consideration before changing Land Registry’s set-up. Thus, we haven’t made a decision on this occasion”.
That echoes what my noble friend the Minister has said on previous occasions.
The more I probe this, the more worried I become. I may be quite wrong, and perhaps the Minister will correct me, but I have formed the impression that the real driving force for the privatisation proposal and, now, for this present proposal to absorb the whole of the local Land Registry function comes from the Land Registry itself and from Mr Edward Lester, who has headed it up for some time. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that that is where this proposal has come from. I am not impressed by that. My eye was caught the other day by a Statement in the House from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, repeated in this House by my noble friend Lord Deighton, about the question of what they call,
“off-payroll contracts in the public sector following the introduction of tighter rules … when I published ‘The Review of the tax arrangements of public sector appointees’”.
Lower down, it turns out that the Land Registry has recently been in breach of that requirement, where,
“a senior Land Registry board member was engaged off-payroll for longer than six months. As a result, a fine of £1,030,176, the largest for an off-payroll breach so far, has been imposed on the Land Registry for breaking these rules”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/7/14; cols. 23-24WS.]
That does not inspire one with confidence.
I let my noble friend Lady Stowell know that I was concerned about this. I had a very full e-mail from her this morning, while she was still in her post at DCLG and before she had become Leader of the House, in which she set out, at some length, the circumstances that underlay that decision. I would not dream of repeating it all, but the fact of the matter is that that Statement was correct: the Land Registry has been fined over £1 million for not complying with government requirements on off-payroll salaries.
When I look at the supporting documents published with the Bill, I find that they are all signed by Mr Ed Lester—they are not signed by a Minister at all. The impact statement is signed by the chief executive of the Land Registry. One has become totally accustomed to impact statements being signed by Ministers, and one wonders why this is. What is going on?
The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and my noble friend Lord Tope referred to the very long Government response to the consultation. It is a substantial document. Question 7 asks:
“Do you have any comments about the reasons to change Local Land Charge services and do you see any benefits?”.
The answer was:
“The majority of respondents to this question felt that the reasons given in the consultation to change LLC services were not supported by the evidence produced and that the perceived problems with the current service had been overstated. Many felt that the consultation did not provide sufficient information of how the proposals would work in practice and that they would not produce the costs benefits or a centralised one stop shop”.
That goes to the heart of the proposal in the Bill. I repeat: there may be a case for it but it has not yet been convincingly stated, which was the point that I made to my noble friend at Second Reading.
I referred earlier to the reply dated 1 July that my noble friend sent me to a number of questions. She said:
“Government acknowledges the concerns raised in some consultation responses. It also recognises Land Registry’s experience in providing registration services and believes this ideally places it to provide the local land charges service. Land Registry will continue to carry out extensive engagement with local authorities, personal search companies and key industry stakeholders”.
The last sentence gives one some encouragement: at last, they are listening. My noble friend Lord Tope referred to the Local Land Charges Institute and its letter dated 12 June. Having said that it was not provided with any satisfactory answers, it stated that,
“the Minister has declined our invitation to meet to discuss the proposal”.
That does not inspire one with confidence. When it asked for a meeting, the Minister’s private office—of course, I do not refer to my noble friend now because she was not there—would have taken advice. The advice from Edward Lister was no doubt, “No, don’t waste your time seeing these people. This policy is going ahead and you’ve got better things to do”. As a Minister, one has seen responses of that sort. A wise Minister says, “I think we ought to see these people”. In those circumstances, I like to think that perhaps that is what I would have done as a Minister.
Since Second Reading, when I raised my anxieties about this matter, they have been increased. I am not at all sure that the Government will be justified in proceeding with this proposal now. I say with some sadness that so far they have entirely failed to convince almost all the people involved, customers and providers, of the case for this centralisation.
As for my noble friend Lord Tope, I can say a curious thing: one has occasional periods of lying awake and last night I wondered who invented the phrase “postcode lottery”. I raised this some years ago in relation to the health service when the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, was the Minister in the Lords answering for the health department. I said, “If you’re going to localise the health service, you’re going to get different services in different parts of the country. Does that qualify as a postcode lottery?”. He said that he did not much like that phrase himself. I said, “If you’re going to localise, you’ve got to recognise that there will be different local solutions to the problems”. To let the press get away with condemning that all the time as a
postcode lottery makes an absolute nonsense of the process of localisation, which I have always understood that all parties are now subscribing to. I took a full part in the proceedings of the Localism Act as it went through, and we all supported the principles that were behind that. In this Bill, though, we have nothing more than a substantial centralisation, a withdrawal of functions from local authorities to the centre.
What are the two arguments being put forward? One is that this is all going to be digitised and therefore needs to be uniform, and the other is that there are different charges in different parts of the country so the charges ought to be more uniform and it would be best to do that by centralising. I do not accept either of those arguments as they have been put. I hope that the Minister is going to make a better fist of convincing the Committee that these clauses really represent such an advance in the service that will be given to customers that we ought to swallow our doubts and accept them. In the mean time, I have to say that I am not very happy about it.
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