My Lords, I want to speak to Amendments 82A and 83A and thereby take in my noble friend’s Amendment 88. Amendment 82A concerns the amount of time for the negotiation of the MRO. In the original Bill, it was stated to be 21 days, which I think is too short. The difficulty for identifying a time for any negotiation is that the time required at the beginning of the process, when it is new to both parties, will be different to the time to produce a market rent in a negotiation in, say, five years’ time, when everyone knows what the rules are. When the lawyers are helping both sides with their arguments, it could take substantially longer than 21 days.
My noble friend may say that that will come out in the detail of the Pubs Code and the statutory instrument, but how will that time be judged? Will it change from the beginning of the period and a few years’ time?
Amendment 83A concerns the problem that under the Bill and the government amendments, existing tenancy agreements would continue. So the lease would continue in all respects other than in the rental. That brings up the difficult subject of SCORFA—an acronym standing for “special commercial or financial advantages”, and is designed not to flummox the great people of Hansard but to refer to all the advantages given to the pub tenant, all the way down to providing glasses, ashtrays and beer mats.
If the lease is being changed to rent only, it is unreasonable to leave the landlord, the pub owner, in the position of providing those benefits when he is not providing the rent. My noble friend may say that all those points will be dealt with in the statutory instrument that forms the Pubs Code, but it will be subject to consultation. What if the result of that consultation is a mass of people saying that it should not be included? If so, will we have landowners subject to a lease that is not right, where one important clause has been removed?
Surely my noble friend will agree that a matter as reasonable and important as this should be in the Bill and bring forward government amendments to deal with the issue.
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