My Lords, first, I am very sorry if taking a long time last time irritated the Minister. It was an important set of amendments and I think these amendments are also important, although I will try not to irritate him. It is a pity that he did not feel able to accept the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, about openness and transparency and impact assessments. I remind him that he dealt with my argument by assuring me that I would know that the Government clearly would not have brought forward proposals unless they had been cleared at the highest level and that lawyers had looked at them and he wanted to assure me that they all worked. That sounded to me very much like an impact assessment or, at the very least, an explanatory note, so I am hoping that he can publish the documents that were used inside the department to decide that this is indeed a viable system to place before your Lordships.
With that preliminary, I enthusiastically support my noble friend Lady Pinnock’s Amendments 93 and 94 proposing a peppercorn figure for the cap. The Minister indicated at an earlier stage that the figures in the Bill are, to an extent, arbitrary. A number has been decided,
perhaps based on some total amount of money that the Treasury thinks it is prepared to pay which has been divided by an assumed number of residents to produce a cap figure. It may be neat arithmetic for the Treasury, but it is not neat arithmetic for leaseholders facing their payment.
Some very pertinent questions have been asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and other participants in this debate. I hope that the Minister will at least be able to commit to writing a letter, having carefully read Hansard, about this group of amendments and the previous group to make sure that he has ticked off all the queries that have been raised. They have all been advanced by noble Lords who very strongly want to see effective legislation but have various levels of severe concern about whether this legislation will be effective. I am sorry that it may be a little painful for him, but we need to understand the correct answers to this and, if not, to try again on Report.
This is a sensational policy development by the Government in interfering with the market. We believe it is justified in principle, but we want to see that it has not just been waived through without serious thought and consideration. It is easy to have popular legislation, although it would be more popular if the cap were a peppercorn, as my noble friend Lady Pinnock has proposed, but that does not mean that it will work. Plenty of popular legislation turned out not to work. The Dangerous Dogs Act occurs to me, and we must not turn this into a dangerous buildings Act full of good intentions but unable to deliver.
In relation to the other amendments, in Amendments 56 and 57, the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, has produced, as he always does, extremely reasonable amendments and it is hard to see how the Minister can dismiss them. When we look at this, and bearing in mind that the Minister said in relation to the whole of this debate that the Government are still in listening and learning mode, it might be important to listen to them and to bring them forward again.
There was a theme too about excluded groups. It starts with a bold statement that no leaseholder will have to pay and then, as the noble Lords, Lord Leigh and Lord Naseby, and others have pointed out, there are little nooks and crannies in this which means that there are groups of leaseholders who will not benefit from the pledge, apart from the fact that there is a cap, which there certainly should not be.
In the debate on the last group, I commented on government amendments in some detail. I am sorry that it was a bit too hard for some people—it was a bit hard for me and I probably got some of it wrong—but I want to pick out from this current group some points that arise from government Amendment 70, which puts in place remediation contribution orders. I have a feeling that when it comes to assessing what the sum should be, the quantum that appears in a remediation order, all the issues I raised on the last group will raise themselves again. I hope the Minister is not persuaded by an argument that says, “The facts will speak for themselves. It is easy with a building, you can just go and look at it and tell whether it is compliant or not, and then you can decide how much it cost, and then they have to pay.” It is all a question of who decided
that that would be used, who put it up in that particular way and what kind of regulation was carried out. We are talking about events that may have taken place 20, 25 or 30 years ago; the current opportunities to retrieve that information are very small and the chance of delivering it is very small as well.
The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, raised the point about the interaction of this process with the courts, which will be required to decide what a building safety order and a remediation contribution order should actually be. What should it be when it gets signed off by the courts? They will want to know the answers to this and I think the Minister will have heard that a number of noble Lords have a sneaking feeling that that will prove a very difficult hurdle to get over with the provisions in the form that they are.