My Lords, I would like to bring a little experience to this debate. I was involved in an enfranchisement over getting a share of a freehold from leasehold. Although it was an enfranchisement, if I remember rightly, the costs were not payable by the tenant in the enfranchisement proceeding before the tribunal. Notwithstanding that, it is interesting to know what can happen in these tribunals. In the tribunal in which my residents’ association was involved, we were paying £3,000 a day for a lawyer. I remember sitting there one day during the inquiry. There had been a gentle chat in the morning and at lunchtime the chairman of the tribunal looked up at the clock and said, “I think we’ve had an interesting day and I suggest that we adjourn until tomorrow morning”. In the event that the bill had been payable, the residents would have had to share out the £1,500 costs. In fact it was not payable, because, as I said, it was an enfranchisement. In circumstances where the liability did fall on the tenants, the bill would have fallen on the residents. Ministers have to have in mind the fact that complications such as those can arise in a tribunal, where the chairman might not be fully aware of the costs of the lawyers representing the residents.
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I have a little experience of the second issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, because I also live in Westminster. We had the devil of a job tracking down the 168 members of our residents’ association, which we needed because we had 999-year leases. The reason was quite simple: in London most of the flats were owned by people from all over the world—Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia. How were we possibly going to get their addresses? When we approached the management company, which obviously had the addresses because it had to send them their service charges, for example, we were told that it was not within its rights to give us that information. The amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, deals specifically with that problem and I think Ministers should be sympathetic. If they cannot be sympathetic today, perhaps civil servants could give the matter a little more thought when they are advising Ministers in the future during the course of the Bill.