My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the amendment, but I am not sure that I would advocate it in this form. I am very familiar with the cost of something being “from £X” and you find you have to order three dozen of whatever it is in order to get the £X. That has always been a bone of contention for me. Where I depart from the noble Baroness is when it comes to an area of my own expertise, which I shall use as an example.
In party-wall cases, where people want to undertake certain work to their building, they have to serve a notice on the adjoining owner, and if the adjoining owner does not agree, then the parties have to appoint surveyors to deal with the matter for them. That takes the two neighbours out of the frame, which is part of how the thing is designed to work. The person proposing the work is obliged under the legislation to meet the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner, which may
include their professional fees. When a surveyor is faced with this situation, as I frequently am, it may be a building owner but it is normally an adjoining owner who rings up and says, “I have been served with a notice by our neighbour and I think I need a surveyor”. Assuming that it is a case which needs a surveyor and that they are not best advised to agree to the thing and let their neighbour get on with it, there is then the question of how to structure the fee that is dealt with.
There is a European directive on the provision of services. I forget its precise name, but I am sure that the Minister will know about it—I will find out if necessary and write to her. One of the things in it refers to the cost of the service provided or the manner of calculating it shall be set out—I do not know whether I am quoting that verbatim but it is something along those lines—along with all the other things, including the identity of the trader, the time taken to deliver the service and that sort of thing. The difficulty is that, until one gets on site, one does not necessarily know what one is faced with. You may take on a job and then find that the person promoting the work has a fly-by-night builder but has no engineer on site, yet they are doing things involving some quite serious construction that affects, for instance, party walls or adjacent excavation in an urban environment. You may conclude that they are not doing it safely. They may also have as their surveyor someone who is not that experienced and does not know what is supposed to be done. Then you end up having to hold the hand of the other person’s surveyor.
All this can run up costs which one did not anticipate at first, so providing full details of the total cost of the service in that instance would be nigh-on impossible. However, providing the mechanism for calculating it is perfectly reasonable. It so happens that, under party-wall legislation, the building owner carrying out the works is obliged to refund only the reasonable costs of the adjoining owner. There is that fall-back and it is obviously up to the surveyor to justify the reasonableness of whatever it may be—the hourly charge, the amount of travel, the frequency of visits and everything else. However, the total costs in such circumstances would be extremely difficult to pin down.
That might also happen in any other construction-related job where there are a number of variables and where, typically, you will have provisional sums in a building contract to cover certain things. Those might be based on a prime cost or just a spot figure, but they are subject to a demonstration of the amount of man-hours and materials that have gone into the job at the end of the day. Sometimes I get called in, as do colleagues, to try to deal with situations where the amount claimed is unreasonable because a contractor has an add-only calculator or the consumer is on a fixed budget and cannot agree to anything that exceeds it, and so on.
The idea is to get to having provisions that deal with the real world of things. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady King, has rightly pointed to a situation where you buy a product, such as the tickets to the theatre or whatever it is. Inevitably, services do not necessarily quite fall into that category. Yes, you can get a fixed price for doing your bathroom floor—I am
sorry to go on about bathrooms but your Lordships get the drift—but other things are not capable of being drilled down to that degree of finesse. I would advise a bit of caution and flexibility in the overall approach.